No one had bought his books – his words were all swept away into the sea of self-published obscurity.

Ron couldn’t count the number of rejection letters he’d received in seeking a publisher. For his own sanity, he’d come up with a therapist-sanctioned ritual for their destruction. However, his main problem was the management of his growing anger and frustration at being ignored, evidenced by the fact that his poetry blog had devolved into rants against the publishing industry – and that he’d decided that he was going to quit his writing ‘career’ at year’s end.

The stress of the upcoming holidays, the dreaded trip to visit Sara’s parents, and the backlog of orders at his day job only worsened his attitude.  Ron had walked out onto Madison’s icy Lake Mendota on a freezing winter night to blow off steam and conduct his ritual of rejection, only to slip and crack his head.

He was shocked to awaken in Welford, England on a mild spring morning – an Elizabethan-era England.  Had he hit the ice that hard – was he in a coma? Dead? Try as he might, he seemed to be unable to return home to Madison. Encountering a prominent literary figure of the time made Ron yearn to either learn more from this person or to break free of the persistent hallucination. Unable to escape, he thought his fate would be to end his days passively observing a dull rural life from another time.

Suddenly he was back in 21^st century Madison. His time for reflection in the quiet town - and the writings left by a mysterious visitor who had been living in his house while he was away in England - ended up forever changing his attitude toward his life and his writing craft.