Hello Internet! It’s me, SA Stovall, here to talk about my upcoming Christmas novella, Thirty-One Days and Legos, as well as share a quick excerpt!
Thirty-One Days and Legos follows two men, Owen and Carter, who adopt a pair of brothers right before the Christmas season. While Owen wants to celebrate all thirty-one days as though they’re each their own Christmas, Carter struggles to connect with the two kids. Add in a new adopted cat (named Legos) and hijinks ensue! Check out this excerpt (Carter dealing with the new cat and worrying about the kids) and see what I mean!
“You broke one of the parenting class rules,” Owen says, saving me from my depressing thoughts. “They said you weren’t supposed to take a new animal in at the same time you get the kids. Too much work. And it takes your focus away from the child, remember?”
“Yeah, well, I buckled in a moment of weakness, all right? I can’t follow all their damn rules.” I say everything with more bite than I intend, but Owen responds by squeezing my hand, calming me down in a matter of seconds. I exhale and squeeze back. “You should have been there when the kid asked to keep it.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t say no.”
He laughs his Owen laugh, and I can’t help but smile. I don’t know where the man finds all his optimism and happiness. If he died he’d be reincarnated as a double rainbow.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Owen says as he stands, breaking contact with me. “We can talk more about the TV situation afterward.” He walks off but stops at the edge of the hall. “We survived our first twenty-four hours, Carter.”
“That we did,” I drawl.
He disappears into the hall, and I return my attention to my pizza.
And then the damn cat starts to hack and wheeze.
“What’re you doing?” I ask it.
Legos gags and convulses, her legs trembling. She vacuumed that food so fast it’s no wonder it’s coming up again. I jump from the table and attempt to catch her before she vomits, but the cat hobbles away and then hurls her half-chewed cat food all over the tile floor. To make matters worse, she stumbles through it, creating paw prints across the floor in her yellowish-green bodily fluids.
Goddammit.
I scoop the cat up and take her to the sink, biting back a whole host of curse words. The feline meows a sad and frightened chorus of mews.
“Don’t start making noise,” I say through clenched teeth. “You’re already on my shit list.”
She continues her yowling as I turn on the water. Then she becomes possessed by a demon from the ninth layer of hell and thrashes around like she’s part honey badger. Her claws rake across my arms, her fangs sink into my flesh, and she spins in the sink with more muscle than I thought a cat could muster.
Not today, Legos.
I clench my jaw, keep her in the sink, and somehow squirt soap onto her using my elbow to pump the dispenser.
“You will get clean,” I say, holding her in the stream of water and rubbing the soap over her legs and paws.
I’m pretty sure my blood is all over the place, but now it’s just the principle of the matter. After a minute of struggling, the cat relaxes and I can finish her cleaning. Our war zone of a bath leaves me with scars, but she smells good afterward. Which is more than I could say for her when she got to our house. Damn cat looked like she died of the bubonic plague in one of her past lives.
Legos leaps from my hands the moment I let her go. She sits on the counter, shakes off, and then licks herself as though nothing ever happened.
“Seriously?” I ask with a grunt. “Weird-ass cat.”
I wipe my arms off, taking stock of the damage.
Eh. I’ve had worse. I had to pull a beaver from a felled log, and the damn thing thought I was going to eat it. The worst part was visiting the doctor afterward to make sure I didn’t have rabies. I should probably do it again, given Legos’s dubious origins.
With a clean rag, I scrub the floor and rid the kitchen of the cat vomit. I finish up and listen.
The stillness of the house bothers me.
All those parenting classes said that our house should be full of noises with two brothers, but I don’t hear a thing.
Blurb for Thirty-One Days and Legos
Park rangers Carter and Owen Williams have decided to expand their family and adopt two brothers—boys they rescued a year before when they tried to escape the foster system and flee to Canada. After completing their parenting classes, Carter, a reserved man who enjoys the simple life, swears he’ll be the best father possible. His patience is tested, however, when one brother adopts a cat out of the snowy Voyageurs National Park and the other brother refuses to talk about what’s bothering him.
Owen wants to make sure their first Christmas together is a special one, and he decides all of December should be a celebration. He has an activity planned for each of the thirty-one days, but none of them seem to go off without a hitch. The cat has fleas, the boys need to attend a court hearing, and Carter is more than a little overwhelmed.
But Carter is 100 percent determined to make his new family work. He just has no idea how….
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S.A. Stovall grew up in California’s central valley with a single mother and little brother. Despite no one in her family having a degree higher than a GED, she put herself through college (earning a BA in History), and then continued on to law school where she obtained her Juris Doctorate.
As a child, Stovall’s favorite novel was Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. The adventure on a deserted island opened her mind to ideas and realities she had never given thought before—and it was the moment Stovall realized that story telling (specifically fiction) became her passion. Anything that told a story, be it a movie, book, video game or comic, she had to experience. Now, as a professor and author, Stovall wants to add her voice to the myriad of stories in the world, and she hopes you enjoy.
You can contact her at the following addresses.
Twitter: @GameOverStation
Website: https://sastovallauthor.com/