Author

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

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In his fifteen years as an ordained priest, nothing could prepare Father Paul Griessen for what awaited in the hospital ICU. Called in to anoint a patient clinging to life, victim of a tragic accident that took the lives of her entire family, he discovers the patient is Sandra Besher, his high school sweetheart. Awakening from a coma, Sandra struggles to walk and talk and has no memory of the accident, her family, or her own identity. Her only connection to her past is the kind priest who comes to visit.

Her doctors enlist Paul to assist in her recovery which he interprets as a sign from God he is meant to minister to his old friend and in the months that follow, he becomes her constant companion. In the process he experiences a taste of what secular life with Sandra might have been, rekindling long-forgotten feelings he manages to suppress until she strikes up an innocent friendship with an engaging French widower and natural feelings of jealousy emerge, tumbling him headlong into an existential struggle over whether God is testing his faith, or if God’s Will is for him to be with his one true love.                                  

[107,000 words]

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The Consolation Gift (alt. title, A Little Strange)

Eleanor Kouign (pronounced “queen”) is an award-winning professor of genetics at Princeton University, but lately she has been “out of sorts”—snapping at students, fighting administration, and becoming increasingly estranged from her quirky “Dr. Doolittle”-type biology professor husband—and doesn’t know why…until she learns an ambitious young research assistant with whom she parted ways five years earlier on bad terms is now CEO of a bio-tech startup and is speaking at an upcoming conference.

They were cut from the same cloth—sharing a passion for genetics, laughing at the same jokes—but when he suddenly abandoned the project to pursue his own dream, out of spite—or hurt—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 possibly be…Ellie proposes a trial separation from her husband and against the advice of her therapist, sets off for the conference with a grand scheme to present her former assistant with a lighthearted “consolation gift” to make amends for the award he never received, building up their anticipated reunion in ways that might not quite be in touch with reality.

[70,000 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. And although she hasn’t performed field work since becoming a senior executive at the Red Cross, she finds herself boarding a plane for the jungles of Colombia, risking her own 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 that still plays music. 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 out there 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 somehow 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 in office, President Roland Tharpe declares himself ‘President in Perpetuity.’ Eight years later, the country is in a very different place. Red shirted militia patrol the streets arresting people at will, and citizens are required to belong to one of six megachurches the largest of which is led by the charismatic Reverend Jeremiah LeGuerre and his wife Renee whose fiery tele-sermons are broadcast each week into every household in the Nation.

Althea LeGuerre, their only child, witnesses her father’s rise to power by drumbeating Tharpe’s promise to ‘restore Christian values’ through mass deportations of non-Christians while her mother, Renee, stands idly by. Enrolled in the last university class to graduate before the book burnings, Althea and her classmates disappear underground, only to emerge four years later a well-organized, well-armed militia that stages a successful coup to take back the country.

The new regime, however, proves even more oppressive and intolerant than the Nationalist Christians and Renee is horrified to learn that her daughter is one of its supreme leaders. Driven into hiding and fearing for their lives, the Nationalist Christians look to Renee as their only hope in convincing Althea to end 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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