Excerpt from novel, "The Wolf and The Eagle "

Lily reached out with a decidedly unfriendly hand and slapped the alarm clock. It was beside the point that the environmental alarm clock was playing her very own selection of waves crashing against the shore, a sound that she loved. It was still an alarm clock. “Who in the hell spawned the alarm clock?” she muttered. She felt sure that it was some sort of personal vendetta against her, though she couldn’t imagine whom she had pissed off to such a grand extent.
“Okay, Miss D,” she spoke aloud, yawned, and began a catlike stretch. With that innocuous movement, rather than slinking her way up out of the darkness of sleep, Lily was yanked awake to the violent pain that had recently invaded her body and her life on a more and more frequent basis. She was a prisoner and her body was the incarceration facility.
What irony Life throws around…it had taken her longer than most to feel masterful of her limbs and the rest of herself, and now here she was, having to learn a new way, a different lesson. She often thought of the pain that assailed her body as a fiery tiger stalking her; always in search of yet another trail to follow that would end in a new, all-enveloping and unwelcome heat. Her natural stoicism might flee momentarily, but like the Phoenix, it rose time after time, and after marshaling some reserve, Lily was ready to go another round.