About My Book

Creative Woman Seeking Freelance Work

After spending two years mourning the loss of her husband–Bobby Delray,an almost famous, Country-Western, singer–Stella Delray, an understated, self-aware but lost, sexy thirty-seven year old, and mother of six-year old, Santiago, emerges from her grief coma to find her life needs an overhaul. The forces of nature, her own biological needs, her family, and the wider world, are pushing her to redefine her expectations of life.  However getting on with life means facing some demons, namely her mother-in-law, her own prejudices about happily ever after, and making good on some death bed promises.

For reasons she never really understood she held onto Bobby’s ashes.  After leaving the crematorium, she dumped his ashes into a Ziploc freezer back and then stuffed the bag into a wide-mouth sports bottle, which she later clipped with a carabiner to her black Timbuk2 bag.  He went where she went.  Stella finally honors her deathbed promise and releases his ashes in the San Francisco Bay, which proves to be the catalyst that propels her life forward.

She knows she more than ready to redefine her place in the world and is expecting an easy ride since she’s already paid the world in tears and grief.  Fate has other plans for Stella.  She loses her job a week before Christmas, her monster-in-law resurfaces, after being missing for 30 years, Bobby’s father shows up on Stella’s doorstep, and she accidently falls in love with Jack Francis, the lanky stranger haunting her dreams.  It’s complicated since he is also the reason she is unemployed.   Try as she might she can’t hate him anymore than she can turn off the liquid lust that boils off her skin like a vapor when he is around.

Her best friend, Bono—pronounced Bone-O—is the owner, of ‘Bono’s Beautiful Buns’, a boutique bakery in San Francisco, encourages Stella to post an ad on Craigslist advertising her professional skill sets with the goal of landing a few part-time jobs that will hold Stella over. Bono is hoping that Stella will rediscover her passion for writing and finish the novel she started before her husband died, while Stella is hoping to find a real job.  The posting on Craigslist brings more than she bargained for, namely that she wears independence well but it forces her to reconcile her definition of a traditional life.

Stella finds having a new perspective opens more doors than it closes,  and that the extended family she always wanted but never had comes with dramas, which are fraught with pain and love so tightly entwined she is never really sure, which is which. She struggles with reawakened desires, which she thought were lost when Bobby died, but her body and soul are hungry and craving more than the dreams of the lanky man with grey-blue eyes. In the end, she finds her voice as a writer, a lover she can’t keep, a family is worth the hassle it brings, but mostly Stella learns that happily ever after doesn’t come in one size fits all.

Brenda Moguez Copyright © 2011 All Rights Reserved