Which is a darker secret: a home where a mother forces her children to cry into a machine to create salt to pay for her drinking problem, or a mysterious forest that is forbidden to all children? Jeff Smieding, a UW-Eau Claire alum who grew up in Altoona, recently authored, And in Their Passing, A Darkness: The Salt Machine, a fantasy e-book being serialized in three parts by Red Sofa Books. The story is about two children, George and Vera Detzler, who are searching for a way to survive their mother’s abusive behavior. When George finds it hard to cry and create enough salt for his mother, his sister takes over for both of them. Vera soon runs away into the forest and George follows her to find the forest holds even more secrets than he ever imagined. “It started out as a sketch and then over the years it just never really wanted to go away,” he said.

When Smieding was in graduate school at Hamline University in St. Paul, his thesis project was to write a novel. Afterward, he wanted to continue his work on The Salt Machine and explore that idea even more. He said the hardest part was finishing the book, but not because he was running out of creativity or energy. “It was something I really loved to work on, and I didn’t really want to stop,” he said. “So I found myself as it got closer to the end procrastinating more and more. I didn’t want to finish it, I found a solution to that, and that is to make it a series.”

The target audience for this novel is middle-grade readers, but a mature audience can appreciate the story as well. There’s a local tie, too: The city in the book is based on Smieding’s hometown of Altoona. The author hopes to start the next book in the series soon. To learn more and find out where you can buy the book online, visit redsofabooks.com.