900 Miles
Sudden luck strikes the one person who won’t share the news.
It’s a mega win on a weekly lotto ticket; a ton of cash.
But even though Christina’s howls of triumph scare the cat, she can’t tell her stepdad Harrison. Not even when a frustrated, off-the-cuff retort to a co-worker sets her free from a newspaper job she no longer needs anyway.
She fills notebook pages with bucket lists, but can’t bring herself to just pick any. Wanting but not letting herself have, that’s Christina all over. Motherless, practically raising Harrison instead of the other way around. For Christina, winning is what you hide so fate can’t make it sour.
But fate has other plans.
She lucks into a newer, quirkier job (to hide from Harrison), and the new office opens a whole new world right on her doorstep.
Bit by bit, Christina’s horizon widens. A black and white photograph helps her to discover friends of the finest kinds. A tribe with eyes like hers.
While she struggles with Harrison’s addiction, and fights against all that she now has, fate wheels Christina on a 900-miles road trip to confront the young woman she could be, but can’t yet face in the mirror.
E.J. Runyon
E.J. Runyon lives in the US North East. Since 2002 she’s found herself moving on to smaller and smaller towns, while working to become the author and writing coach she planned on being.
First, she quit working in software and sold her home to finance her degree in Creative Writing and her Grad-work in Online Teaching and Learning. She’s never looked back. Now, her life revolves around her own writing and Bridge to Story – an online creativity coaching business she runs– and you know, being a better person day to day.
E.J.’s passion is focused on writing fine prose and on getting folks writing, her aim is coaching them in writing well. She participates yearly in National Novel Writing Month – an event she’s been involved in since 2001. Several of the short stories in Claiming One are excerpts from her many in-progress and published novels, written during various NaNoWriMo years.
Her debut novel for Inspired Quill, A House of Light & Stone, was nominated for the 2015 Dramatic Fiction award at The Golden Crown Literary Society (GCLS).
