Author

Writing about mid-life characters pursuing second chances that don’t always turn out as planned…

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At eighteen, Paul Griessen answered the calling to become a Catholic priest, leaving behind a carefree life of fast cars, high school dances, marching band practices, and his first true love, Sandra Besher, the girl he thought he would one day marry. More than twenty years later, Father Paul Griessen walks into a San Diego hospital to bless a patient in a coma, sole survivor of an auto accident that took the lives of her entire family, only to discover the patient is Sandra Besher. Awakening from the coma, Sandra struggles to walk and talk, and has no recollection of the accident, her family, or even her own identity. With no next of kin, her only connection to the world she once knew is the nice priest who comes to visit.

When Sandra’s doctors ask Paul to help restore her memory, he interprets this as a calling from God to minister to his old friend, and throughout her recovery becomes her constant companion. In the process, he experiences a taste of what a life with Sandra might have been, rekindling old feelings he manages to suppress until Sandra strikes up an innocent friendship with an engaging French widower and jealousy emerges, leading to an impulsive kiss that raises Sandra’s hopes for a new beginning, but tumbles Paul headlong into a struggle over whether God is testing his faith, or if God’s ‘calling’ is to be with his one true love.                                  

[97,000 words]

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The Consolation Gift

Eleanor Kouign (pronounced “queen”), an award-winning professor of genetics at Princeton University, is “out of sorts”—snapping at students, fighting with administration, and becoming increasingly estranged from her quirky “Dr. Doolittle”-type biology professor husband—but doesn’t know why…until she learns her ambitious young research assistant with whom she parted ways five years earlier on bad terms is now CEO of a bio-tech startup and speaking at an upcoming conference. To Ellie, he was cut from the same cloth: they shared a passion for genetics, finished each others’ sentences, even laughed at the same jokes. But when he suddenly abandoned the project to pursue his own dream, out of spite, she removed his name from the award submission…and now wonders if she let her one chance at true happiness walk out the door.

Obsessing over what once was…and what could again possibly be…Ellie sets off for the conference against the advice of her therapist to present him with a lighthearted “consolation gift” to make amends for the recognition he never received and building up their anticipated reunion in ways that might not quite be in touch with reality.

[60,000 words]

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Friend in Need – A Novella

Out of the blue, Caroline Metzger receives a phonecall. The pregnant wife of a former employee she hasn’t seen in three years is asking for her help—he’s been imprisoned in Colombia, mistaken for a local insurgent. Although no longer performing field work since becoming a senior executive at the Red Cross, Caroline finds herself boarding a plane for the jungles of Colombia, risking personal safety, to negotiate the release of her protégé, her friend, and the one for whom her feelings run more deeply than he would ever come to know…

[20,000 words – can be developed into a full length novel]

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2 A.M. Dedication (working title)

Somewhere in the middle of the Kansas prairie, Rick Sanders sits alone in a tiny broadcast booth between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. spinning oldies at a low frequency a.m. radio station—one of the few remaining to still play music. And each night at exactly 2 a.m., he broadcasts a special dedication: “This one goes out to April…from me” in the hope that somewhere in the still of the night, the woman he drove from his life twenty years earlier, when all he thought he needed was fame and cocaine, will hear his voice, and find it in her heart to forgive...

[This manuscript is currently in development.]

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Tao of RUE (a dystopian novel)

Under the pen name Eskatrine Ska

Three weeks after the start of his second term of office, President Roland Tharpe declares himself ‘President in Perpetuity.’ Eight years later, the country is in a very different place. Red Shirt militia patrol the streets and Nationalist Christians control society. Citizens must belong to one of six megachurches, the largest of which is led by the charismatic Reverend Jeremiah LeGuerre who helped Tharpe get elected and whose fiery tele-sermons are broadcast into every household in the Nation.

Althea, the only child of Renee and Jeremiah LeGuerre, witnessed her father rise to national prominence by drumbeating Tharpe’s message of ‘restoring heartland values’ through mass deportations and rescinding the rights of marginalized people while her mother, Renee, stood meekly by. Hers was the last university class to graduate before the book bans and crack down on free speech, and following graduation, Althea and her classmates disappear underground…only to emerge years later as a well-organized, well-armed militia led by Althea that stages a coup and successfully overthrows Tharpe.

But to Renee’s horror, the new social order established by Althea based on the principles of ‘RUE‘ is even more violent, oppressive, and intolerant than the last. Nationalist Christians, now the oppressed and driven into hiding, look to Renee as their only hope in convincing her only daughter to stop the savagery and save humanity. But as Renee quickly discovers, there is more than one path to salvation.

[This manuscript is in early stages of development]

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If you are a literary agent interested in representing me and my work, please email me at catherineellbogen@gmail.com.

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