Paragraph Ranch

EVERY WRITER KNOWS YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. But that's just what is required of West Texas expatriate Dee Bennett-Kaufmann when her mother is badly injured in a mysterious car accident. Single-again "Dr. Dee" has never been on the "A-team" in her trendy East Coast MFA program. When a prestigious summer fellowship gives her the chance to finally finish her book, salvage her career, and spend some quality time with her college-age daughter - Dee's certain her luck is about to change. Returning to care for her irascible, widowed mother threatens all of that. With so much at stake, Dee engineers a series of unorthodox strategies and creative tradeoffs to keep her options in play-and despite herself finds friendship, love, and the power of words in the unlikeliest of places.

Can she piece together a dream on a shoestring? As new owner of the falling-apart family homestead in West Texas, Dee Bennett is wrangling ways to earn a living, mend fences with farm and family, and manifest her dreams as a writer-all while nurturing the budding relationship with her beau, outdoorsy photographer Max Miller. But when a drop-dead-gorgeous, high-powered handler for a candidate in a key statewide election blows into Claxton, rivalries bigger than politics and football develop. With stakes running high on the campaign trail, as well as in publishing dreams and love lives, a Bennett family wedding must be attended to. And Dr. Dee, with the assistance of her motley writing-group protégés, must search her soul and fend off a host of challenges to live the life she just might learn to love.

The citizens of Claxton, Texas, are justifiably possessed with a healthy thirst-on the dusty plains of West Texas, they're in the midst of a seven-year drought when the town finally votes to go wet. The opposition faction, and its leader, Miss Jessica Cater, manage to shut down the promotion beer-store owner Buck Turlock has cooked up just in time for the Fourth of July celebration. But will Buck's schemes lead Miss Jessie to rethink her position?