As my new novel, Megaflood, climbs sales charts at Amazon and other major booksellers, I’d like to take time to thank the person most responsible for the book’s meteoric success: its heroine, Denawe.
She’s the young woman, not yet sixteen years old, who faces one challenge after another, from abduction to battling a fierce sabertooth cat to fleeing in the company of her love, Temokin, from fierce warriors bent on their destruction. Then comes the ultimate threat of all, an apocalyptic flood that swept half the State of Washington during the Ice Ages 14,000 years ago!
The image above evokes the beauty of a girl who embarks on an adventure far beyond what the average female of our times–or any times–might expect to experience. No, the bronze bust wasn’t cast to commemorate my story. It’s a statue of Sacagawea, the legendary guide of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1805. But Denawe would have looked much like her. Both women were natives of the Pacific Northwest, separated by only 14,000 years, a geological twinkling of an eye.
And the two heroines have much more in common. Both were abducted from their tribes and marched far away to be slaves and someone’s personal property in villages far from home. Sacagawea was horse traded to the fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau and became his wife. Denawe, too, is subject of a bidding war, with mammoth ivory, the hide of a colossal short-faced bear, and an amulet carved from a sabertooth tiger fang as part of the bride price.
But these two women, Sacagawea and Denawe, were much more than mere objects of barter. They stood on their own and made their way boldly in the world. History tells us how Sacagawea guided the Lewis and Clark party over the snow-clad Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. My story tells how Denawe joined together with her young warrior love to lead the Mammoth People on a path to salvation in the face of an annihilating flood.
Here’s the rest of that statue, a state monument in Sacagawea’s homeland near Salmon Idaho. Here, the two heroines diverge a little. Sacagawea carried her infant son with her on her journey, while Denawe was as yet unmarried. But never fear–matters of that nature can change in a hurry. So, does Denawe become a wife and mother in the course of my book? Read it, and find out!
Megaflood is available at all major booksellers’ websites in ebook and paperback versions. Click this
link to go to a page where the different sellers are listed. If you’ve already got your copy, please remember to review it on Amazon or other booksellers’s pages. Those reviews are deeply appreciated by us authors, and can help encourage the booksellers’ crunching computers to try and sell more books. Thanks!
