We have a motto up here on the ridge: no assholes and no drama. Some of chickens didn't get the memo at first. This is the story of Amelia, our sweetest girl, and how a flock turned on her — and what it took to bring her home. And Bertha.

I miss flying every day. But the funny thing is that now, in my fifties, what I miss most is all the stuff I hated about it in my twenties. The studying. The planning. The tedium. Turns out that's exactly what made it worth doing.

I started writing what would become Spirit Mission in the summer of 1991. It took 25 years, a dot matrix printer, a fat lazy cow of a first draft, and one hell of an agent to get it published. Here's how it happened.