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Sully's Magma, a Novel
Author, L.Nolan-Ruiz
Why should anyone care to read about some nobody's life and her flirtation with death?

The heroine--Salena Pasture, is a successful Professor of British Literature. She battles suicide EVERY DAY. The final outcome of this novel will be surprising to readers.

Sallena's life is a sequence of accidents, starting with her birth.

Salena's mother -- Luccia -- was diagnosed as Manic Depressive. Being a preacher's wife who never wanted to be a mother, or have children, did not help her illness at all. Instead, Luccia wanted to be a fashion designer. She was very talented indeed. But being a minister's daughter in the 20s and being betrothed to a man 20 years her senior, she was distressed to have no say in the matter. After her marriage to Justis Pasture, Luccia gave birth to 6 children one after the other. Her 7th and last child carried the brunt of Luccia's frustration and misery: the accidental child, Salena Pasture.

It was not that Sally's mom was maliciously abusive. She was just not there, though she was there physically. When Luccia finally decided to divorce Justis after a secret affair, and wanted to realize her dream at 35, she acquired tuberculosis, to her despair. After being assigned a death sentence into a hospital ward where she could not be visited, she became disillusioned, and though she did not actually achieve death there, Sally's mother -- Luccia -- eventually committed suicide though alcoholism.

Looking back at Salena's birth, we see how sorrow was embedded in her persona, for Sally was supposed to be a boy. Her parents believed that a boy, as the last of 7children, would care for Luccia until her death, since father was aging more rapidly than Luccia was, and because -- well, Luccia was not there.

Before Sally was able to prove her significance, her father was killed in a car accident on a missionary assignment, and it was then that she was taken into a sidepath to discover who HE really was. These early events set the tone for Sally's life journey into an early mental breakdown, developing self-destructive behaviors, and finally, to follow in her mother's footsteps into alocoholism, only in a functional closet.

Sally pronounces her self defined plight--being a burden by being--to be the cause of the life she barely lives, and where she is sure she has learned her exercise of shallow breathing. For, abundant life was not meant for accidental survivors.