Unicorn Wisdom

Life lessons from the thrift store: even unicorns fall flat on their face sometimes! ✨ You just dust off your hooves and get up again. Meet my new deskmate/ paperweight, Ophelia. 

A Slow Summer Song

I had hoped to have the first draft of Agent Regalia finished by May 31st. Alas! I have this nasty habit of writing chapters that become too long and require expansion into new chapters. While the novel was originally supposed to be about 75k words, it will probably be closer to 100k by the time I am finished with it! I have about 6 chapters and 30k words to go. 

My present plan is to finish the full draft by the end of June, spend July and August revising it, and send it off onto the wild sea of submissions in September. 

Part of the reason this WIP is taking me so long to finish is the sheer amount of crazy random research required for each individual chapter. Wedding fashion and customs, the frozen nitrogen heart of Pluto, blue sulfur fires on volcanoes, Brutalist architecture, enhydro crystals . . . this is a love story! But not just Regalia's love story. It's also my life-long love affair with science fiction and Star Wars, Star Trek, and Star Gate, etc. Everything I love about the zany, imaginative freedom of an adventure in space.  

I hope I can ink it right.

I hope I can write it. 

I'm grateful for all the pixie claps from family, friends, and my amazing SCBWI group that keep me chasing after Regalia. 

 

 

A Theme Song for a Story

I like to pick songs as the imaginary theme tracks for my stories.

For Bad Species: Diary of a Once and Future Human, my SF MG verse novel currently on submission, I instantly felt that Iniko's ethereal yet powerful song "Jericho" fit the theme perfectly! 

My story explores the life of thirteen-year-old Pearl, a girl born on a hostile world where humans will never belong. Descended from shipwreck survivors, she grew up on glorified ghost stories of Earth, but all she wants is to feel at home on Azuride even though she has always been taught to view her identity one way: 

"I am not really here, I'm an intrusion" (Stanza 2, Line 2, from Iniko's "Jericho"). 

For "the tell-tale traces of a different star" always betray Pearl in her "red, iron-rich blood." Red is a rare color on Azuride . . . a raw and jarring hue that is considered to be unnatural.   

Deep in her DNA, Pearl can't help feeling the pull of the planet her species lost even though she is hopelessly mired in the wreckage of a cruiser that will never fly again:

"My blood churns wild and raw inside me

as I make it to the captain’s chair first—

what is this energy, vast as starlight?

I almost feel like a blue sky human:

INVINCIBLE."

In "Jericho," Iniko sings of the longing to be a free voyager, too: "I got Milky Way for blood, evolution in my vein/I'm gone, I've been far away /I'ma lumineer now, makin' moves, startin' waves" (Stanza 1, Lines 2-4)

Pearl's journey in the ink is to discover the grit of true worth and strength at her core.