AUTHOR OF THE DAY:

ROBERT EGGLETON

Robert Eggleton has served as a children's advocate in an impoverished state for over forty years. He is best known for his investigative reports about children’s programs, most of which were published by the West Virginia Supreme Court where he worked from 1982 through 1997, and which also included publication of models of serving disadvantaged and homeless children in the community instead of in large institutions, research into foster care drift involving children bouncing from one home to the next -- never finding a permanent loving family, and statistical reports on the occurrence and correlates of child abuse and delinquency. 

Since winning the eighth grade short story competition, he has aspired to become a rich and famous author. Always inspired by pursuits of remedies for the most needful, except for a few poems that were published over the years, fiction took a backseat. In 2002, Robert accepted a job at a local community-based mental health center. The program where he worked served kids with serious mental health problems, many of whom had been traumatized by child abuse, parental abandonment, rape…. For the first time in his career, his job description did not include the production of written material. The heartfelt need to write began to build until one day something almost magical happened. 

In 2006, Robert met the role model for his protagonist during a group psychotherapy session that he was facilitating. She sat around a table used for written therapeutic exercises – a skinny eleven year old girl with stringy brown hair. Instead of just disclosing her abuse by one of the meanest daddies on Earth, she spoke of her hopes and dreams for the future, finding a loving family that would protect her. Robert named her Lacy Dawn, the origin of the Lacy Dawn Adventures project.        

After fifty-two years of contributions into the U.S. Social Security fund, Robert retired in 2015 to write and promote his fiction. Three short Lacy Dawn Adventures have been published by magazines: Wingspan Quarterly, Beyond Centauri, and Atomjack Science Fiction Magazine. Rarity from the Hollow is his debut novel. The Advance Review Copy was named one of the best books of 2015 along side of Revival by Stephen King and The Martian by Andy Weir.  It was also awarded Gold Medals by two prominent book review organizations. On December 5, 2016, the final edition of Rarity from the Hollow was released to Anazib. Author proceeds have been donated to a child abuse prevention program operated by Children’s Home Society of West Virginia. http://www.childhswv.org/  

Robert continues to write fiction with new adventures based on a protagonist that is a composite character of children that he met when delivering group therapy services. The overall theme of his stories remains victimization to empowerment. So far, most of his work has been literary genre benders with a speculative or science fiction backdrop. His next major project is titled, Ivy – an almost forgotten Appalachian town and the headquarters of an alien invasion of Earth. Of course, satiric social commentary is written into the story.   

Purchase links:

Book Depository

Amazon

Dog Horn Publishing
Weightless Books

Author Contacts:

Lacy Dawn Adventures
Goodreads
Lacy Dawn Adventures on Facebook
Twitter
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Linkedin

PS from me, Diane, I read both the first and the second editions of Rarity From the Hollow.  I enjoyed the second much more than the first.  Here is my review of the second on Goodreads, Rarity From the Hollow  The picture though is the first.