An Adventure Well Begun: Lightning Gap

By Kari Kilgore

A writer's life in a magical bookstore

One week into her year-long stay as writer-in-residence at the Odds and Endings bookstore, insomnia grabs EllaJane Cole.

Along with a creeping fear of never getting started.

She hopes to catch inspiration in a late-night wander through the enchanted shelves.

Find out if EllaJane discovers her version of "Once upon a time..."

An excerpt from An Adventure Well Begun:

A Beginning Filled with Promise

EllaJane had promised herself, sworn, declared, and asserted, that she wouldn't let the pressure of the wonderful opportunity and all those decades of tradition get to her. Not when she had the chance of a lifetime to make all her dreams, and Chris's as a character, come true.

And still…

Here she stood. Not with writer's block, not exactly. She didn't believe in that, really. She had bunches of ideas and thoughts and plans of what she was going to write during the twelve months stretching ahead, and Chris was excited and willing to help with every single one.

If only EllaJane could find the starting point, the door. The first words to compete with the venerable "Once upon a time…"

Maybe those children's book authors were onto something.

She turned out the last light, rolled the bookcase aside to get to the secret staircase, and crashed right into Chris one step below.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Feb 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393926177

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

An Adventure Well Begun

For all the muses,

whether you can see them or not

An Adventure Well Begun

A Lightning Gap Story

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

An Adventure Well Begun

EllaJane Cole, brand new writer-in-residence at the Odds and Endings Bookstore, padded around the darkened house in her favorite orange and blue fuzzy socks.

They didn’t match the warm pink pajamas her brother had given her when she turned forty, and clashed even more with the cardinal-red terrycloth robe her granny had made for the same birthday.

Even worse was the sunshine-yellow headband she slept in to keep her chin-length brown hair off her face.

She’d never wear such bold and odd colors during the day, but alone at two in the morning, the contrast pleased her.

She’d wondered if her night owl tendencies would shift once she moved into the basement apartment in the sprawling Victorian house, but one week into her year-long residency, her pattern hadn’t changed.

Well, that wasn’t quite true.

She had much more interesting prowling-around territory than in her old family homeplace back in Bountyfield, Virginia.

Rather than plain tan walls covered with generations’ worth of mortifying grade school and high school photos, every inch