Hey Everyone,
Happy Summer! Life has been busy with my new audio drama podcast, The Diarist. I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel but I miss my solitary creative writing endeavors too...I'm finally back to updating my website and I wanted to share a free read with you all. I'm making epub, mobi, and pdf available to all my readers here on my website.

Enjoy & happy summer. If  you like the novel all of the sequels are available for free on wattpad or you can email me and I will make a ebook copy for you!
Donna

A little more about the story:
 Read Exuberance Is Beauty, a featured novel on wattpad. The first book in a 5 book saga with over 100,000 reads on wattpad.
Oregon, 1940s: Eve Miller, a young war widow, rebels against the ordinariness of womanhood in the post-war era. Eve is enlightened as she succumbs to the sensual temptation of an adulterous affair. In its aftermath, Eve Miller’s life unravels and leads to unexpected violence and moral isolation. Exuberance Is Beauty, is a contemporary interpretation of Adam and Eve’s biblical allegory and Eve’s fall into desolation. The story examines the consequence of erotic obsession and the repentance the female protagonist must pay for her sins of the flesh.

Reviews

"This story is a very intense psychological thriller and a hauntingly beautiful story at the same time."

"This story is intense! I love the way the author pulled it all together, and gave us a terrifying glimpse into the mistreatment of women in the 40's"

"I highly recommend this book. It's a great, gripping read."

"This is a socially important and poignant tale of a war widow’s seduction."

My New audio drama The Diarist was featured in Bello Collective's debut podcast. We are brand new and would love listener feedback in the form of listens, swaps, or conversations. Thank you reddit audio drama community--you have been enormously helpful! "The Diarist is what you get if Mad Men and Jane Eyre marry and have a baby, where a secretary becomes the personal assistant to a prickly and strange ad executive and falls in love. It’s about regular people in the 1950s making bad decisions. The voice leads in particular are instrumental in creating a haunting story about people that could have been happy" https://bellocollective.com/audio-drama-debuts-an-early-spring-9f7ad1a51a18
You can find the diarist at: http://thediaristpodcast.com

In 1984, Liz Seccuro a freshman at University of Virginia was drugged and raped at a fraternity house party. She woke the next morning , bruised and battered. The house was eerily empty, an unusual occurrence in a busy fraternity house the morning after a party. In physical pain and shock Seccuro walked form the fraternity house to the university hospital. She was told they did not do rape examinations and would have to travel to a larger city. When Seccuro went to the leaders of the University she was brushed off, lied to, and turned away. Her story, despite thirty years passing, Seccuro’s story sounds very much like college campus rape stories in the news today.

What made Seccuro’s memoir so interesting to me was that the story of her rape was suddenly in her life again 25 years later. Like Seccuro I was raped as a young woman. I moved on and created a wonderful life for myself. I got married, went to graduate school, had children, and am a writer. Then I was called several months ago out of the blue and told by the San Francisco Police Department that there had been a DNA hit on the man who raped me. Some twenty five years after being raped the SFPD sent my untested rape kit to the lab and a serial rapist was identified. When I found Crash Into Me, I identified with Seccuro. I related to her experiences as a young, ambitious, independent woman coming of age in the 1980s.

Seccuro found out about the man who attacked and sexually assaulted her when he sent her a letter in the mail twenty five years after raping her. The letter stated he was in Alcoholics Anonymous and he had reached the step where he had to take responsibility for harm he’d caused authors. In the letter he apologized for harming Securo. As she acted and made decisions those first weeks after the letter, I recognized the subtle rising of PTSD. The blinding effect on one’s present life. Not a sudden darkness, but a tunnel-visioned preoccupation with it. She exchanged a few letters with the rapist but it became clear that he was self-centered and unable to take responsibility for what he’d done. His version of the truth retreated back to subtle but none-the-less ugly misogyny. It also occurred to Seccuro that this man had her home address. He could have emailed and for a rapist to send a victim a letter at their home has the chilling implication of threat.

Because there is no statute of limitations on rape in Virginia, Seccuro was able to prosecute. She went through with it knowing it would disrupt her family and her life. Because she had been drugged her memories of that night were mainly disjointed sounds and sights. The one thing she’d always wondered was whether there had been more than one rapist. She had a memory of being shuffled into a room and voices. As the trial proceeds the rapist remains antagonistic towards Seccuro and his defense attorney employs underhanded tactics to trigger Seccuro’s trauma and challenge her credibility. This included a long back and forth about the blood on her legs. Recalling the blood triggered PTSD in Seccuro and set her off balance during her testimony.

Despite the rapists confession and shocking new information about the rape, the defense makes a plea bargain and the rapist served less than 6 months in jail.


You can find Crash Into Me: A Survivor’s Search for Justice on amazon
and more about Liz Seccuro on her website