Alisa’s Work-in-Progress

It’s such a delight to share details with you about my current work-in-progress titled Genuinely Felt and Bursting With Multiple Colors. This is the story of Louise Shapiro, an artist who suddenly finds herself a widow, floundering in virtual isolation as she grieves.

After her husband Sam’s unexpecteed death, Louise must come to terms with a difficult marriage that’s left devastatingly unfinished. To cope with her pain and the shock she still cannot articulate, Louise spends hours upstairs in her attic studio, obsessed by recreating Sam’s face, remembering every aspect of his features.

Only her dog Abraham has any real notion of Louise’s terrible suffering. He’s her sole companion, the one witness who watches from his flattened pillow across the sunlit room as Louise fixates on bringing Sam back to life through her canvas. Just like every other part of her existence, she keeps this desolate struggle to herself, where the anguish strictly becomes apparent within each paint stroke, not by any other means of communication.

In time, though, Louise is forced from the sanctuary of her attic, urged on an unanticipated journey to achieve emotional independence. After discovering a random note tucked into one of the books crammed into her husband’s dusty bookshelves, Louise begins to learn about Sam’s secret life, a world conveniently hidden behind his endless array of obscure sales jobs. As she follows troubling clues that Sam accidentally left behind in his many uneven piles of used books, within thousands of papers scattered among drawers, stacked in dark corners of various closets, she learns the startling truth about her husband. His numerous mysteries, so deeply hidden within the chaos of their relationship, are then revealed in gradual, almost unexpected rays of light that release Louise, granting her an authentic independence that she’d never experienced before.

The trail of Sam’s extraordinary secrets, a fusion of conspiracies, twisted murder plots, and sordid locations around their suburban Illinois town, compels Louise to rethink every aspect that she’d always assumed about her husband and their marriage. Despite the pain and continual shock Louise feels with each unanticipated detail that comes to the surface, she never stops pursuing the various avenues, which emerge from her all-consuming search.

The end result, finally evident in all of its extreme messiness and astonishing havoc, leads to Louise’s ultimate freedom. Yet it’s a liberation she couldn’t have envisioned before entering Sam’s mind to discover the person she’d never really known.

I look forward to providing you with further information on my latest mystery as the story continues to develop. It’s a novel I’ve been working on for years, mentally revising the story’s multiple threads while also reshaping its complicated facets at the same time. Little by little, night after night, I’m weaving this novel together. And I very much look forward to sharing this project, a work that I view as my most meaningful story to date, with you as soon as possible.

Thanks so much for your interest. Please feel free to stop by this page from time to time. I plan to keep updating it with new details as I continue to make further progress and I always welcome your visits.