Beetle: The Autobiography of a Virtul Girl

by Michael Wescott Loder

Lanie Whitehead, a smartass, interfering but compassionate virtual girl, attempts to insure a future for her nerdy creator and his girlfriend during their last year on a university campus. How do paranoid administrators and a possessive former boyfriend deal with a person who does not really exist, can walk through any wall, listen to any conversation, but cannot ever leave campus or actually touch anything inanimate? And what is she to do if her computer shuts off, and when someone turns it back on, it's a dozen years later, and every person she knows is gone? Being a super-smart virtual girl, she investigates, discovers the truth and kicks butt. A bitter-sweet, often funny story of courage, growth, love and finding understanding.

307 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2019

About the author

Michael Wescott Loder has climbed and caved his way across the United States, been an Air Force officer, photographer, park naturalist--and an academic librarian for more than 30 years. "Wes" has worked in eight different states, but is now retired and lives next to the family farm in a passive-solar, off-grid house he designed himself. There he gardens, writes, plays the Highland Bagpipe and watches his grandchildren grow.

Wes wrote his first childrens' story when he was seventeen, and over the last quarter century has completed 19 other stories. He published his first YA novel, "The Golden Horn," in 2007 and "The Nikon Camera in America, 1946-1953" in 2008. "Taken beyond the Ohio, the Indian Captivity of Marie LeRoy and Barbara Leininger" And "Beetle: The Autobiography of a Virtual Girl" have been published by Hemlock Lodge Press and are available through Ingram and Amazon.