CURRENT NEWS
As of July 1st, 2012, I have paused querying literary agents in order to make edits to the UNFAMILIAR SPELLINGS manuscript. With any luck, I’ll be able to return to querying sometime in 2013. I’ll keep you posted!
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PUBLICATION CREDITS:
“Tech Support” (short story) — The Toasted Cheese Literary Journal
“Comedy for Dummies” (nonfiction) — Chicken Soup for the Soul: Just for Teenagers
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WORKS IN PROGRESS
Title: SHADESHOCK
Genre: YA Historical Fantasy
Word Count: 50,000 (projected word count: 90,000)
Status: Editing/Drafting
“WHEN I’m asleep, dreaming and lulled and warm,
They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.
While the dim charging breakers of the storm
Bellow and drone and rumble overhead…”
- “Sick Leave”, by Siegfried Sassoon
France, November 1916
2nd Lt. Calibor Arthur Tildon was born lucky. There’s a reason his men trust a 19-year-old officer to lead them, even in horrifying trench conditions with the constant danger of self-destructive magical weaponry—he’s clever and resourceful, with a sixth sense for danger and a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
But that was before Arthur had a conversation with a dead man. Before his beloved friend, Emre, killed himself with a magic-infused grenade. Before Arthur realized that not all the people he sees in the trenches are actually alive.
Questioning his own sanity, Arthur is diagnosed with shellshock and shipped back to England. But as it becomes clearer that the ghosts aren’t figments of his imagination, all the psychological treatment in the world won’t answer his questions: Why are the ghosts of soldiers haunting him? What do they want? And, most painfully, why is Emre’s ghost the only one he can’t see?
With the help of his skeptical sister and little brother, Arthur will have to navigate the shady and fraud-ridden world of spiritualism and magic to get the answers he needs. But with an angry medium, a greedy magician, and an army psychologist on his trail, Calibor Arthur Tildon may have gotten himself into more trouble than he can handle—and his lifelong supply of luck may finally be running out.
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Title: WANDERING STARS
Genre: Sci-Fi
Word Count: 50,000 (NaNoWriMo draft)
Status: Back burner
17 inhabited planets
6 sentient species
1 itinerant Shakespeare company
In the year 2213, Anthony McNeil is 33 years old, recently divorced, recovering from a personal tragedy, and practicing a profession that is about as relevant to modern life as the slide rule—namely, Shakespearean acting.
In the year 2213, Kathryn “Kit” Haller is 13 years old, recently homeless, currently parent-less, and running from the police (not to mention the former life that haunts her at every turn).
In the year 2213, Anthony offers Kit a spot aboard the Helen Aeris, spaceship of The Speckerman Company and home to its cast and crew members. With nothing but escape and the possibility of asylum on her mind, Kit accepts the help—and gets a lot more than she bargained for, including something that almost resembles the loving family she always wanted.
There’s just one teeny-tiny problem: Kit already has a family, and it wants her back.
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Title: LIGHT AND DUST
Genre: YA Sci-Fi
Word Count: 50,000 (NaNoWriMo draft)
Status: Back burner
Wide nostrils never stretched by pain,
Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein,
And feet that iron never shod,
And flanks unscarred by spur or rod…
- Lord Byron, XVII, Mazeppa, 1818
Seventeen-year-old Cordelia Melgan will never again be a homeless orphan on the streets of Inik. Not if she can help it, anyway. For the past year, Cory has held a job at one of Inik’s innumerable racetracks, and she and her brother Malcolm are living with their Uncle Zaz. Okay, so maybe Zaz is just waiting until Cory turns eighteen before kicking them out. So maybe Cory’s job sucks, and Malcolm wants to drop out of school to become a jockey. Still, anything is better than begging and stealing, and things are looking up. That is, until Cory makes a mistake that almost leads to a jockey’s death, a mistake that gets her fired and ruins her chances of ever working at another racetrack.
Panicked by the prospect of being homeless again, Cory takes any employment she can get, doing odd jobs that earn her only a fraction of her old wage. Until one day, she is asked to deliver a package to an address that doesn’t exist. Unable to deliver or return the parcel, Cory takes it home and discovers that it contains a program chip for an Astan racehorse—a corporeal hologram made of light and dust, and worth ten times what Cory could make in a year working at a racetrack.
When Malcolm secretly enters himself in a race using the horse, Cory is furious. But one race all it takes to show them both that there’s something strange about this hologram. Their mystery horse has a glitch—a glitch that protects it from the racetrack’s booby-traps and allows Malcolm to win. And win. And win.
Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to buy that an untrained fourteen-year-old has turned out to be a prodigy jockey, and not everyone is willing to let Malcolm keep winning races.
Particularly not the people who made the glitched horse in the first place.
