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Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent and a sense that she has used up her illusions. I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much, she tells a hapless suitor. I'm 38 years old, and I've got a daughter learning to read and a job I don't quite like. But when the new tenant in her in-law's apartment turns out to be Michael Christopher, on the lam after 20 years in a monastery and smack-dab in the middle of a dark night of the soul, Rebecca begins to suspect that she is not as thoroughly disillusioned as she had thought.

Eli Tremaine has had one great regret in his life. When she walks into his shop one day looking for a grave stone for her daughter, their long buried but unresolved past asserts itself amidst her grief and failing marriage. Eli, a stone mason, is sure of only one thing, a fundamental truth he has learned working stone: You can spend days or weeks whittling a block down toward the essence of what you want from it and lose it all at the crucial moment by giving in to the temptation of the quick and easy stroke.

More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search of a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to Earth long ago. The only thing keeping the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers - men and women who risk their lives by skydiving to the surface to scavenge for parts the ships desperately need.

Let outlines help you write a better book! Writers often look upon outlines with fear and trembling. But when properly understood and correctly wielded, the outline is one of the most powerful weapons in a writer's arsenal.