GUEST POST

| LEIGH HERSHKOVICH - AUTHOR OF DEBUT 'SHATTERED ILLUSIONS' |

| AUTHOR BIO |

    Leigh Hershkovich's writing career began almost at infancy. Born and raised in The City By The Bay, Leigh was never seen without a pen and paper by her side, and was never without a story to share. With her vivid imagination and sharp writing tactics, Leigh has taken the world by storm twice over. Now, with her debut novel Shattered Illusions, readers will get a first time glimpse into her first full fiction attempt.

    An avid reader, accomplished pianist, passionate scholar of language and the arts, Leigh currently resides in New York with her imagination.

    You can learn more about Leigh and Shattered Illusions by visiting her website, checking out her Facebook page, or her blog.

| THE ESCAPE ARTIST |

Long day at the office? Kids driving you nuts? Bills giving you a heart attack? Give yourself a break! Follow me through this vision and allow your worries to crumble to the floor.

Close your eyes and envision a place in which every worry of life would simply disappear. Take a deep breath, beginning at the root of your toes and floating all the way up to the top of your head, and out. Allow your body to become light and at ease, as though you are on a bed of water, floating gently down a river bank. Forget every worry; allow all thoughts of pressure or stress to melt away. You are in a safe zone now, and nothing else matters. Your skin radiates light and grace. You’re positively glowing. Be it ocean, mountain, city or field, the vision of such a place makes your skin tingle with excitement. Take in the vivid landscape of your parallel universe, and make it your own. Allow the ease of the world around you to soak into your skin, into your blood stream. You are safe here, you can let go. And exhale.

Now, open your eyes. Where are you? In the same state of chaos and discontentment that you were in only moments ago? Or, do you find yourself in a state of peace and ease? You may not be able to travel to your desired “escape” destination, but if you focus hard enough, that destination could make itself home within your mind.

Escape routes, at times, are absolutely necessary. When the stresses of life prove to be impossible, it always makes things a bit easier to know that if you really wanted to, you could get up and leave; take off in the middle of the night and assume a different identity. Find a new city, a new home, a fresh start at life. You may never use your get away plan, but it’s good to know that it’s there, waiting for you to sneak off in the middle of the night and run away with it like a secret lover.

But, what if you could run away? What if you could leave everything behind and just bolt? Forget everything you know and love, push it all away and really drink in the thought. Pack essentials and nothing more. Don’t tell a single soul of your plan. Steal away in the late night and don’t look back. Regret nothing, and do everything your impulse pushes you to do. You’re home free, and nothing can stop you.

When I began writing Shattered Illusions, I was seventeen, and my mind was dialed high on escape. With six months away to graduation and therefore freedom, nothing pained me more than staying tied down to a commitment that I had long lost care for. I could not wait to jet out of my quaint hometown and lose myself in the life of a big city. Nothing thrilled me more than the thought of wandering through the busy streets of Manhattan, my mind full of new ideas, my feet plagued with blisters and bruises. At the time, my life was taking a very different course, one that I was not entirely sure I wanted. There was comfort in knowing that if I really set my mind to it, freedom could be mine. Of course, with the little I understood about life, I believed that running away and starting over would be easy.

Quite often, when in such a blurred state, one tends to smudge the lines of reality and fantasy. Everything outside of their life seems breathtaking and delicious, while the world they find themselves in feels ugly and prison like. One tends to forget that even fantasy takes work, and often times, one’s fantasies prove to be more nightmarish than the nightmare they had intended to escape from to begin with. The grass may seem greener on the other side, but if you took time to water your lawn, you might be surprised with how green it could be.

If you reached a breaking point, a place of no return, and you had to escape, where would you go? For the four, poor, trapped characters in Shattered Illusions, that escape zone was found in the fictional town of Rolland, Louisiana. For better or for worse, the strong, independent, hard working adults find their lives crumbling to pieces, and for different reasons, make the drastic decisions of relocating. If only for the summer, they leave their worries and cares behind in their hometowns and escape to Rolland (or so they think). Little do they know that the worries and stresses they wished to escape follow up and escalate out of control upon arrival.

Ella Sansburg, the naive, slightly sheltered young woman finds herself fleeing her hometown in search of a family member she has never met, in order to escape the harsh realities of a broken engagement.

Danny Michaels, the misfit, wannabe criminal, finds himself shipped to Rolland after a misunderstanding of epic proportions lands him in prison.

Sarah Grigg, the household name of therapists, on the road during a lecture tour, finds herself pulled, seemingly by a magnetic force, to the small, simple town where she comes face to face with her worst enemies.

Marco Santorini, the only local, if you could call him that, finds himself thrown in with this mix of misfits as they all find common ground over the food he serves them, and the love he shares with them.

When a local business owner is murdered before their very eyes, these four accidental onlookers realize that not only have their problems followed them, but they have escalated out of control. Their perfect escape zones become more nightmarish than the hell holes they came from.

How was Rolland born, you ask? It was quite simple. I admire those authors that have the ability to tamper with history and make it their own. It takes courage and a power house of strength to change the course of history, even for fictional terms. At that time (and even more so, now) it seemed impossible for me to intertwine my worlds. I had to find a place that was unknown to me, as unknown and foreign as it would be for my characters when they were to grace the first page of the novel and enter the threshold to their setting.

They had to be strangers to the land as much as they were strangers to themselves. Their history with the location had to limited, and it could not be the permanent home of any of the characters. They had to be weary travelers, searching for a home, both physically and mentally.

I was frightened by the thought of using a fictional location. How could I give myself the right to plot a fictional town in the middle of a factual country? Where could I build a town over a plot of land without stepping on the property rights of others? I learned that I had to give myself that right. I needed a place that was neither mine, or the characters. It had to be as unknown and mysterious to me as it would be to them. I had to discover it, step by step, as they would in the wake of the events that were yet to take place.

Slowly but surely, I began to create the town. Small, quaint and charming, it had to hold a grave past. Its body had to possess a heartbreaking beauty and devastating heartbreak. In other words: It had to be a survivors' town. A small haven where the washed up folk could go for peace. The story had to be just as much about the town as it would be about the people that inhabited it. But, as fictional as it was, it still had to feel real. It had to have a real past, a real potential for a thriving future. It had to be a place where I could point out on a map and visit.

And that's exactly what I did.  I took out a map of the United States and began to search. Where could I place this small, unassuming plot of land without bothering existing cities? Where could I build and not destroy?

Almost immediately, my mind fled to thoughts of Louisiana. I felt as though the thought was grabbing hold of me with a magnet. A state that had endured a tragedy and had, at the time, only begun to rebuild itself from the ruins.

My plot of land had been discovered. Then, with my bare hands, I began to dig the earth of what was soon to become Rolland County, Louisiana.

Thank you for, Leigh, for visiting once again and for your extremely interesting, and insightful post. It's a short story on its own, and one I've now read numerous times.  I look forward to your book cover release.

To read my review of 'Shattered Illusions', please go HERE.