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INSPIRATION IS OFTEN MYSTERIOUS AND UNPREDICTABLE

2/23/2026

I'm often asked what inspires me to write a particular story. I've written twenty novels and the answer to that question is never the same. In the case of A Harbor of Hope, #15 in the Winston Radhauser series, it came through a character.

I was sitting in a friend's study. It was early morning and no one else was awake. My friend was a successful journalist and the study was filled with books, memorabilia, and things he'd collected over the years.

With no warning, a woman named Lily Donovan came to me with her story. I grabbed a tablet from my friend's desk and began to write a character sketch for her. She was depressed at the death of her year-old twins and didn't know how she'd tell her husband who was about to return from a 10 month stint with Doctors Without Borders in Africa. She also suffered from a mental disorder where she heard voices telling her to do unthinkable things. And, as it turns out, she did.

I didn't know then that she would become the antagonist for my newest novel, A Harbor of Hope.

Once I'd written the five page sketch for her, the story began to fall into place and writing it was easy.

If you'd like to see a preview, just click the link below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1puA0sDLOTc0GCVBkXaVcEqzPeqJseONp/view?usp=sharing

A Harbor of Hope is now available for presale and will release on March 24.

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AT LAST, THE WORDS HAVE RETURNED

6/1/2024

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RIVER OF MERCY WON THE 2025 INTERNATIONAL IMPACT AWARD

I realize it's been quite some time since my last newsletter. Those of you who read my previous letter are aware that my husband of 34 years passed away. The journey through grief was challenging, and I deeply desired to share my experience, especially the painful moments when Andy repeatedly pleaded with me to end his suffering. I yearned to assist him, but I simply couldn't.

One dreadful morning, a year or so after his death, and another nightmare hearing his pleas that I kill him, I pondered, "What if I had?" It was then that the idea for River of Mercy was born. Many of you are also aware that in the 3.5 years since his passing, I've made considerable progress in my healing journey. I've been fortunate enough to find love once more and married John Carter, a remarkable man and doctor, on November 4 of last year. We were enamored back in 1985 and, whether by fate or divine intervention, we managed to reconnect. I yearned to weave our love story into my new book, so I decided to portray John as the attorney representing Santina in her murder trial.

I'm thrilled to announce that River of Mercy will be released on June 18. I hope you'll read it and witness firsthand how life and art are often intertwined.

Detective Winston Radhauser is called in the middle of the night to Ashland Hospital. Ten days ago, Justin Patterson, a local pediatrician, suffered a devastating brain bleed that left him paralyzed and begging for release.

When Patterson is found dead in his hospital bed, the staff assumes it was a natural death. But the victim’s son, Robbie, accuses his stepmother, Santina, of murder. Everything inside Radhauser believes she’s innocent, but when DNA supports Robbie’s claim, Radhauser is forced to arrest the woman he found lying in her husband’s hospital bed, curled around his dead body.

Phillip Mitchell, world-renowned criminal defense attorney, hears of Santina’s arrest and rushes from Tucson to Oregon. He’s driven by a love that never waned, and a belief there was no way Santina could murder anyone.

National news has the country divided. Was it a mercy killing? Or was it murder? How do we put down our suffering animals with more dignity than our fellow humans? Or is God the only one who decides when life ends?

Against a ticking clock and an unyielding DA, Radhauser and Mitchell race to expose hidden truths that could save Santina from a lethal injection.

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS IS OFTEN A MYSTERIOUS ONE

1/20/2023

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Those of you who know me remember my husband of 34 years died 22 months ago. The grief road was a difficult one to travel and, for a long while, writing was my only solace. I couldn’t work on my current novel, so I wrote a grief journal every day for months. I allowed myself to feel whatever I felt and then tried my best to find the words to describe those feelings. Why? Who knows? It is what I do when I’m trying to understand myself and the world around me.
While I’ve come a very long way, and love has found me again, there is still something that happened during that time continuing to haunt me. His first brain bleed left him paralyzed on the left side and pretty helpless. He ran the gamut of emotions from sadness, humiliation, concern for me, self-pity, and ultimately rage. During those terrible days, Covid also raging, Andy asked me frequently to help him die. He pleaded, begged, cried, and ultimately screamed, “Susan, why won’t you help me?”

Almost two years later, I still hear those words—often in my sleep. I wanted to help him. We’d had many theoretical discussions during the years about what we would do if one of us ended up in a situation like Andy did, or developed Alzheimer’s disease and no longer knew ourselves or each other. We agreed that we’d do everything in our power to help the other one die. But when it came right down to it, I couldn’t. This inability to help him has caused me both regret and shame. In some ways, it was fortunate he had the second bleed and all hope of any kind of recovery disappeared. He never regained consciousness, but he got his wish and died five days later.

I suppose it was the haunting, the recurrent nightmare that gave me the idea for the next book in the Radhauser Series. I woke up one morning and thought, “What if I helped him? What if the police arrested me for murder?” Those two questions planted the seeds for another novel. And I knew it was one I had to write. Over the last few weeks, those seeds have taken root and grown to 33,000 words. I will title the next book, River of Mercy. I hope to complete it by next summer. Life and art—sometimes it’s hard to separate them.

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HAPPINESS RETURNS

7/10/2022

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It has been quite a while since I’ve updated my blog. Grieving the death of my husband of 34 years was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. And for a while—nearly a year—I was unable to write about anything except the grief and pain of losing him. It was such a sudden loss. He left our house to go to a board meeting and never came back.

On his way home that evening, he had a massive brain bleed. We spent 15 days in the hospital during COVID. It appeared he was improving and might survive—likely with some paralysis on the left side—but it wasn’t to be. Ten days after the first, he had another, even more massive bleed. The doctors told me there was no hope of survival. I spent five more days at his bedside, but Andy was no longer there.

Eighteen months later, I’ve discovered that life has a way of going on. And something amazing and wonderful is happening in my life now. To relate it to you properly, I have to go back 37 years to early 1985. The first man I dated after my marriage ended was a physician at Northwest Hospital in Tucson where I worked. His name is John Carter. We dated for about six months. I was in love with him extremely sad when our relationship ended.

I left my job at Northwest Hospital and went to University Medical Center where I met Andy and, two years later, we married. John and I stayed in touch—an occasional e-mail, a card on my birthday. He read my books. He even visited Andy and me in Oregon 17 years ago when he’d come to Grants Pass to visit an old buddy from high school. He and Andy took a walk together and it turned out that John Carter always knew of Andy because he did his residency at University Medical Center when Andy was one of the deans of the medical school.

When he learned of Andy’s death, John sent me a sympathy card and started checking in with more frequent e-mails. I told him a lot of things about the grief road and how rocky it was, how hard for me to let Andy go. He always wrote back, always kind and sympathetic—saying things about what a good man Andy was and how he wished he’d known him better. How glad he was that Andy had loved me so much.

As the months passed, I wrote an e-mail to John that I was doing better. That I’d turned a corner on the grief road, had packed a few boxes of Andy’s things to donate and had taken off my wedding ring. I told him I was ready to have love in my life again—though I wasn’t exactly sure how that love would manifest. At the time, I thought it would be through a kitten or a puppy.

Within minutes, I got the shock of my life. An e-mail back from John in which he said, “I missed the boat 37 years ago and I won’t miss it again. When can I see you?”

Much to my surprise, I said, “How about tomorrow?”

He flew up to Oregon from Tucson a few weeks later. We met for lunch and it was as if no time had passed. I learned that he'd saved every letter, card I'd sent to him and every photo we'd taken during those 6 months we spent together.

People are not replaceable. And I will always love Andy and miss his dynamic presence, both in the world and in my life. But I know Andy would want me to live the remainder of my days with love and happiness. John and I are together now—very much in love. We both feel as if some cosmic wrong has been righted.

Love, if it is real, doesn’t disappear. It is an infinite resource. It is forever. With that new-found happiness, I have finally been able to write again. Number 12 in the Winston Radhauser mystery series will launch on August 9th. I’m working steadily on #13. I learned recently that #11 - Lost Creek Cabin is a finalist for the RONE award for best mystery.

The photo of John and me in the middle is from 37 years ago. The other two are recent.

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REAWAKENING

3/25/2022

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As many of you know, it's been a difficult year for me with the loss of my husband of 34 years last March. It seemed for months after his death I could only write about him or the grief road.

Over a year later, things have changed and I am writing again. I've submitted #12 in the Winston Radhauser series to my publisher and it should come out sometime in the summer. I'm working steadily on #13.

Naomi Bolton, from Manybooks, contacted me last night about an interview for their website. It is complete and published. If you'd like to read it, you may by clicking the link below:

https://manybooks.net/featured-authors/susan-clayton-goldner-murder-mystery-full-of-twists-and-turns

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Daily Gratitude Reflections - Book Tour and Giveaway

11/30/2021

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About three years ago, I started a gratitude practice using Deborah Purdue's daily refections and her Grace of Gratitude Journal. It changed my life. Every day I write down five things for which I am grateful. At first it felt a bit intimidating, and I found myself struggling to come up with new things every day. One morning I woke up to the sounds of birds chirping. And I was grateful. The sky was clear and so blue I was grateful. The buds on the rosebud tree opened and I looked at them in awe and gratitude. A hawk flew over the backyard casting its shadow on the grass. And I was grateful. The universe is filled with things to be grateful for. What I learned with this: If you do this practice. Write down 5 things every day--you cannot be unhappy. My husband of 34 years died last March. I was devastated. But I continued the gratitude practice. It didn't take the grief away, but instead of constantly mourning what I'd lost, it made me realize how much I'd gained --how very lucky I'd been to walk 34 years with him. And gratitude was what led me through the darkness and back into the light.

Such a small investment, with such a huge reward.

Daily Gratitude Reflections
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Deborah Perdue is the author of five books on her very favorite topic and passion, Gratitude. She also teaches workshops, classes and facilitates women’s retreats on the topics of gratitude, abundance and how to live a life of peace and joy. It is her passion to help others transform their lives, as she has transformed her own through her spiritual path, and the power of being grateful! She has been a Center for Spiritual Living licensed practitioner for over 14 years.

Living in the country in Oregon, her home office overlooks beautiful forested land, and is near the famous Rogue River where she, her husband and two dogs visit, and swim, almost every day in the summer. She hails from the Bay Area, CA where she spent 45 years until moving to Southern Oregon.

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Website: https://www.graceofgratitude.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GraceOfGratitudeJournal
Twitter: https://twitter.com/somuchthanks
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Grief and Love in the Time of Covid

10/18/2021

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Soon it will be 8 months since my husband, Andy died--nearly 3/4 of a year has passed. During the first few weeks after his death, time stood still for me. Nothing felt real. I wandered in a daze around the empty house, constantly replaying events from our life together. As I touched the items we’d collected during the past 34 years, things that meant something to us, I realized there was nothing in my life that hadn’t been affected by losing him. I couldn’t think straight or carry on a conversation. I couldn’t write about anything except him. And I wondered how a person could ever come back from that much loss.

But time keeps moving forward and I’d like to think that I am moving with it—inching my way toward that other life. The one I will live without him. There are still bad days and nights, moments when I lose my way and fall into a deep hole or trip over an unexpected boulder on this grief road. And there are times I wish I could go back into my life with him, especially the rough patches, and forgive more quickly, reach out and touch him more often. I continue to have days when I cry without knowing I’m crying, surprised to feel a tear drop off my chin and realize my cheeks are wet. Other times I am so aware of the pain that I want to scream, howl or visit a wailing wall. But, of course, I feel that way. My heart and my life were shattered.

However, progress is being made. That heart is mending slowly in the ways that it can. It seems I’m learning new things about grief every day. I’ve learned to find comfort in acknowledging my pain rather than trying to make it go away. Grief is a primitive emotion—instinctive and irrational. The desire to scream or howl is very real and raw. Grief is love in its most turbulent and unpredictable form.

It has helped me so much to write about the grief, to be open and honest about my own journey. To tell it the way it really is—how it feels in the middle of the night when I wake up alone and reach for a hand that is no longer there. I want to rid myself of the fear and shame of facing my pain and allowing others to see it. I don’t want to run away from it. I need to confront it head-on. This loss has rearranged everything in my world. It’s shown me how very fragile and random life can be. And I know that eventually it will make me a better, more grateful, and kinder person. It has taught me so much I didn’t know about love and how to give and receive it.

The reality of this grief is so different from what I thought it would be, if I even allowed myself to think it could happen—that Andy could die and disappear from my daily life. I should have known. I did know on an intellectual level. But I pushed that knowledge aside as I suspect most of us do. The truth I know now is that love and loss are inevitable. It takes courage to love, knowing we will eventually lose that love. Maybe that’s the reason we can’t face it until it slaps us in the face. Life is so fleeting. And, the truth is, all hearts get broken in ways no one can fix.

This grief has challenged me to think about my purpose for being here, to think about what I want from my life now. I want love in my daily life again. We all need to give and receive love. The following stanza is from a poem I wrote years entitled Doubt.

Maybe if He had it all to do over,
God would change his mind about Eden
with its serpents and sins,
dictate a new, shorter list to Moses.
One that commands nothing
except we hold on to love,
in whatever form it finds us.

I challenge myself and I challenge all of you who’ve shared this painful grief in the time of Covid journey with me to hold onto love in whatever form it found you—or finds you in the future. There is nothing else that matters. If I’m sure of anything in this life, I’m sure of that.

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