From the author

I've been a lot of things in this life.

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A business owner. A tattoo artist. A body piercer. A community inclusion worker for the mentally and physically disadvantaged. A nurse. A horsewoman. A country girl. I've worked in the oil patch, lived around horses most of my life, and somehow managed to collect a garden, a cat named Dexter, and more stories than I ever knew what to do with.

But of everything I've been, being a mom has always been the part I've loved most... and being a grandma.

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I've always written stories. Sometimes they stayed in my head, sometimes they made their way onto a page, and sometimes they ended up as long Facebook posts that probably should have come with a warning about excessive reading time. Somewhere along the way, more than a few people told me I should write a book.

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Eventually, I listened.

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My first book was Farewell Foundations, written while I was trying to find my way through the loss of the most important person in my life... my mom. Writing became a way of making sense of grief, and of finding something alive in the middle of it.

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WHERE THE STORIES COME FROM

Then came Oathstone.

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I started writing it on a whim, with no grand plan and absolutely no idea where it was going. Somewhere along the way, I fell completely in love with world-building, creating characters, and discovering a story one piece at a time. I never knew from one day to the next which direction the story would take. Sometimes, honestly, it felt like the characters knew before I did.

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The Okanagan found its way into Oathstone. I've lived in the country for most of my life, and I fell in love with the Okanagan long ago. There's something about this valley that gets under your skin. The orchards, the mountains, the lakes, the changing seasons, the quiet spaces between things, the people. How I love the people here.

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The Okanagan became the inspiration for Oathstone, even though the story eventually carried me far beyond anything I could have imagined when I started writing it.

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The story became a world of its own.

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And somewhere along the way, pieces of my own life found their way into it too.

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​And then there's Dexter.

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My cat. My walking companion. My tiny, orange, furry supervisor.

My best friend and I walk the orchards with him, and somewhere along the way, that ridiculous, wonderful cat became the inspiration for Phil in Oathstone.

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The characters weren't the only things that found their way into the story. Places I've lived, things I've seen, people I've known, and pieces of the life I've lived have all managed to sneak through the cracks.

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I've lost both of my parents in the last few years, and those losses have changed me in ways I'm still discovering. Writing has been part of how I've navigated that loss, just as it has been part of how I've navigated everything else. If you've had loss, you will understand Hilder.

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And now, somehow, here we are.

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I never set out to become an author. I simply kept writing stories until one of them became a book.

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So I suppose this is where the story begins.

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T.S. Gale

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Writer. Storyteller. Okanagan girl. Lover of horses, gardens, cats, sketching, photography, and complicated characters.