Peggy Payne, My Life on Earth and Elsewhere

Sensing she’s about to get bad news, Darcy, sixteen, feels herself—or her spirit, to be more exact—rise weightless, out of her body, lifting off the seat of the patio chair. How can this be happening? Her light-bodied airy self hovers high in a backyard tree.
She is not alone! A beautiful teenage boy, shy as a deer, stands in the branches nearby. He sees her and vanishes—as she is pulled back into her body, again tight-packed in her skin.

Her father is talking. Her parents are separating. She’s stunned—the three of them always seemed special, unbreakable. Yet she’s wildly excited by what just happened—though fears she’s lost her family and her mind in the same afternoon.
While her father is in his own religious crisis, she enters an entrancing spirit realm. Must she live a half-life in each of two worlds or must she make an impossible choice? Can the tree boy Risto ever pass as a regular guy? And what becomes of a young spirit being like him? In My Life On Earth and Elsewhere, Darcy has to find a way around barriers present since before the beginning of time.

Peggy Payne writes, and works with other writers, in a sunny office in the Historic Oakwood section at the edge of downtown Raleigh, NC, sharing space with writer/artist Carrie Knowles and her Free Range Studio. She drives home to a log house on a pond in rural Chatham County where she lives with her husband, psychologist Bob Dick. From her husband’s special interest in clinical hypnosis, she learned much that contributed to Sister India being repeatedly described by critics as “mesmerizing” and to Cobalt Blue’s award for visionary fiction.