Home for Novels of Sharman Burson Ramsey	Partyin' on the Plantation summary Partyin' on the Plantation: Prologue Partyin' on the Plantation: Chapter One
	Prologue for Swimming with Serpents Swimming with Serpents: Chapter One

Partyin' on the Plantation Prologue  I awoke to the sound of something slithering beside me. Reluctantly and with great effort, I opened my eyes. I looked up and gazed as though through a tunnel to the light of a bright blue sky in the distance. My hands were sticky and there was no light there where I lay looking through that tunnel to the light. My feet were elevated, propped against the side of that tunnel I was in.  If I was dead and headed through a tunnel to go to Heaven I had somehow gotten stuck somewhere along the way.  Maybe I was in Hell.              Wouldn’t that be a hell of a note?  Finally become a star of the Dish It Up Network, a geriatric sex symbol about to publish a romance novel with Flavian on the cover, on the precipice of perhaps falling in love again after losing my husband to a Speed-Extra truck that ran a red light…and then just…all of a sudden…croak?  I always said it was dangerous just to be alive. But, my current situation did not appear to be the natural order of things…or even an accidental act of God.  The slithering ceased. Praise God.  Did that mean it had coiled and was about to strike?    Just waking up and all, with the chloroform that still clung to my clothes making me slightly nauseated, I decided I’d better lie real still and think about how I had wound up down in this hole. The smell of chloroform clued me in to what I already knew. This was not the well on the plantation at Wayfarer, my grandfather’s house where Sister and I filmed our award winning Dish It Up Network show Partyin’ on the Plantation. And I knew I had not just fallen accidentally in the muck of a nearly dried up well.  Someone had taken issue with something I had done or said, apparently, and had chloroformed me and tossed me down in a well from which I did not think they intended for me to emerge…alive that is. Instead of sitting safely in my red leather chair in my red family room drinking lemonade with my feet up on a stool reading a novel someone else had written, I was about to become a statistic on the Cox County, Alabama, crime report of unsolved mysteries. If I did not do something.  But until I could think of something positive to do, I did not want to disturb the other inhabitants of that small space unnecessarily. And so I lay very still and tried to remember what had caused me to leave the security of that red leather chair and what had brought me to this sad state of affairs.