Today, instead of reviewing someone else’s work, I’m tooting my own horn and offering a gift to all my loyal readers and followers. I’m pleased to announce that my two latest books, My Ideal Partner: How I Met, Married, and Cared for the Man I Loved Despite Debilitating Odds and The Red Dress: A Novel, can now be purchased from Smashwords absolutely free from now until January 1st. See below for more information about each book and links to where it can be downloaded from Smashwords. Happy reading!
The Red Dress
Copyright July 2019 by DLD Books
Front cover contains: young, dark-haired woman in red dress holding flowers
When Eve went to her high school senior prom, she wore a red dress that her mother had made for her. That night, after dancing with the boy of her dreams, she caught him in the act with her best friend. Months later, Eve, a freshman in college, is bullied into giving the dress to her roommate. After her mother finds out, their relationship is never the same again.
Twenty-five years later, Eve, a bestselling author, is happily married with three children. Although her mother suffers from dementia, she still remembers, and Eve still harbors the guilt for giving the dress away. When she receives a Facebook friend request from her old college roommate and an invitation to her twenty-five-year high school class reunion, then meets her former best friend by chance, she must confront the past in order to face the future.
Click to order from Smashwords in various eBook formats.
My Ideal Partner: How I Met, Married, and Cared for the Man I Loved Despite Debilitating Odds
Copyright 2016 by Dld Books
In September of 2005, Abbie Johnson married Bill Taylor. She was in her mid—forties, and he was nineteen years older. Three months later, Bill suffered the first of two strokes that paralyzed his left side and confined him to a wheelchair. Abbie Johnson Taylor, once a registered music therapist, uses prose and poetry to tell the story of how she met and married her husband, then cared for him for six years despite her visual impairment. At first, there was a glimmer of hope that Bill would walk again, but when therapists gave up on him seven months after his second stroke, Taylor resigned herself to being a permanent family caregiver.
She discusses learning to dress him and transfer him from one place to another, sitting up with him at night when he couldn’t urinate or move his bowels, and dealing with doctors and bureaucrats to obtain necessary equipment and services. There were happy times, like when she played the piano or guitar and sang his favorite songs, or when they went out to eat or to a concert. She also explains how she purchased a wheelchair accessible van and found people to drive it, so they wouldn’t always depend on the local para-transit service’s limited hours. In the end, she describes the painful decision she and Bill made to move him to a nursing home when he became too weak for her to care for him in September of 2012. He seemed to give up on life and passed away a month later.
Click here to order My Ideal Partner in various eBook formats from Smashwords.
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My Corner 
I have been going through probably a lot of similar things with my husband to what you have been through, so I sure do appreciate your writing and ways of looking at all of it. That is truly admirable, and I wish I could always be the way you have been in doing the things you have been to care for your husband. Thank you for helping me remember on worst days that I need remember it is not professional care but my husband who is entrusting me to be there for him as he has been there for me when I suffered breast cancer. Thank you always for your beautiful ways of looking at the times of challenges we face through life.
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You’re welcome, Ann. You and your husband are in my thoughts.
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