Local author, busy with life and tales for the many

Colleen Slater, KP News

Vaughn author Kathy Lasher enjoys life and loves to write about it. She is nearly finished writing her third book. Photo by Colleen Slater, KP News

Kathy Lasher, author of two published books with a third nearly finished, admits the first one took a long while to write.

“I had a dream,” she said, but woke before the story finished. She thought about how it might end and began writing –– a fun experience for her.

Lasher said her daughter was “a couple of months old” at the start, and that she completed the story when she was 16.

“Morgan’s Quest” is set in Colorado sometime after the Civil War. A wealthy young woman flees a killer, falls from her horse, and when brought to consciousness is clueless about who she is. The story includes romance and mystery, Lasher said.

Lasher plans a trilogy of novels, with the second one to be released next year.

Meanwhile, her second book, “Heinrich Streudleman Climbs Mt. Baker,” is a whimsical children’s story that came into being as she created a story on a trip to Canada.

“We all have challenges in life,” she said. This story tells how one person with a challenge kept on going until his problem was resolved, as we all need to do, she added.

Both of Lasher’s parents were avid readers, and in the evenings, the family snuggled close while mom read a story, she said. Lasher loved learning about new places and experiences in the stories she heard and read as a child.

According to Lasher, her mother, raised in Idaho, climbed a cherry tree to read. Lasher’s “Up in the Cherry Tree Books” are in remembrance of her mom.

Lasher planted a cherry tree after her family moved to Vaughn 17 years ago, so her girls could climb it.

“But the girls are now adults and the cherry tree still isn’t big enough to climb,” she said.

The Lashers lived in Issaquah when friends moved to Olalla and invited them to visit. They loved the area and inquired about available homes. They drove to one and agreed it was exactly what they wanted.

Lasher, raised on a farm in Alaska, again lives on a farm, with horses, goats, dogs and cats.

She said her family is “very supportive of my writing.” They’re also sometimes amused by her display of emotions as she writes, and often ask what’s happening in the story to make her laugh or become teary-eyed, she said.

Lasher’s books can be purchased from her at weavingtales@gmail.com or weavingwordsforchrist.webs.com, on Amazon, or Dightman’s Bible Book Centers in Gig Harbor and Tacoma.