It should be out by the first of the year. So far, a few galley drafts went out for advance review. Thank you all for your patience with the blog - with household, the death of our Lab Sunny at age 3, and general medical going on's it's been hard to post much beyond Facebook (I know "Facebook is for OLD people" - my granddaughters.)
Here is the back cover description: I thought it would be shorter to just say "I got Abdominal Septic Shock and ended up on the Liver Transplant List and all I got was this Plushie Liver " (which I loved - Thank you Erin C.), but my publisher said "no". (Acually I dont go into much detail on that whole ordeal from a medical standpoint, but the liver is healing and I'm off the list. They checked the rest of me out beyond thoroughly, and even at my age I was in the running (non smoker, non drinker, normal weight, no medications and heart health of a 30 year old though gravity is winning).
Best-selling author, commercial airline pilot, and
retired air crash investigator L.B. Johnson knows exactly how she got here. She
just never expected to arrive quite so soon.
In The Serenity Chronicles,
Johnson turns her attention from wreckage to reflection. A bout of septic shock
and its lasting consequences forced her to reconsider not only the future she
had imagined after retirement, but the very meaning of time. Rather than
measure life by what remained, she chose to live more deliberately in the days
she had.
Written as a series of candid, sometimes irreverent
vignettes, this literary memoir wanders through subjects that initially seem
wonderfully random, yet gradually reveal an unexpected coherence. Johnson
considers the changing landscapes of the body, the ghosts of family history,
the persistence of faith, the enduring gifts of love, and the peculiar
indignities that aging so generously provides.
There is grief here, and an honest reckoning with
mortality. But there is also laughter, gratitude, and the recognition that even
an imperfect life can contain extraordinary beauty.
Johnson writes frankly about what aging takes away—and what it gives in
return. Readers may wince in recognition, laugh at life’s absurdities, and find
some part of their own journey reflected in these pages. Because being alive is an exercise in enduring
surprise.
Sometimes,
serenity is not found in knowing what comes next.
Sometimes, it is found in being
willing to find out.
Here are a couple author blurbs for the back cover.
There’s a reason that LB Johnson has a loyal and even passionate following, and this book shows why. Other writers try to write down the bones, while she loves those bones, polishes them, and gives them life through storytelling. --Latayne C. Scott, award winning author of The Conspiracy of Breath
L.B. Johnson, possesses a sure lyrical style that opens the reader frankly to emotions otherwise neglected. Johnson’s poetic words do not fly off all unattached but plaster themselves to the realities of grief and hope, leaving the reader to sit back and try to account for that which is unaccountable.--Larry Sommers, Author of The Price of Passage
But the one that made me smile the most was this shout out in the substack column for an author that is one of the editors - who is reading it now.