It's been a minute since I've actually let people know what I've been doing and where I'm hoping to go with my writing. Some of you might even think I stopped! Fret not; I'm still putting pen to paper. Creativity is just a little harder when your entire life seems to be in a constant state of flux. Stress really saps you, it turns out.
I, however, am nothing if not a creature of habit, so let me tell you about some projects that were probably (they were, they definitely were) inspired by some stressful events!
First up: the work-in-progress I am closest to finishing (although I've been saying this for about a year now. . . Oops). It's a soft sci-fi project, more speculative than scientific. It follows a group of young adults on their way to a festival competition for the collegiate orchestra ensemble. On their way, they are involved in a lethal car accident and suffer greatly in the aftermath. They suffer so greatly, actually, that they're offered a chance to heal. . . By removing the memory of the accident and thus the resulting trauma. The problem is, choosing to forget the accident and the pain after also means choosing to forget the bonds the five of them forged in the aftermath. Their friendships, their jokes, their love stories. They have to weigh the cost. And that turns out to be a much greater pain than they thought it might be.
Second: A FANTASY trilogy! I really can't say much about this because I'm feeling pretty protective of it because I am SO excited to write it, but the epigraph is from King by Florence and the Machine, and I would say that if you loved Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Hunger Games, and A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab, then this trilogy is for you.
Third: A dark academia, but I'm not a Classicist. So it's a dark academia, but make it a little more psychologically violent. Hello, thought experiments, class criticisms, and philosophy/psychology/criminal justice/literature things I learned but never did anything with. (There may or may not be a concept of preserved and recycled consciousness to test the weight of nature vs. nurture. Who can say?)
Fourth: This one is going to be a labor of love and take me the longest, by far, to complete. Imagine a world where there's proof of life after death. Not in ghosts, not in communication, not in God, but in electrical activity traceable to specific individuals. It starts as a theory on a small island, participants there willingly and aware that their death ultimately has to be planned. Imagine the realization, once the science is refined and the results definite, that this information is globally destructive, so of course it's sat on. Imagine the whistleblower and the fallout afterward. I recently watched Interstellar for the first time, and it helped me inadvertently solve the struggle I was having with how to best to tell this story. I now have my main character and the point of view planned out, so now just comes the actual story, of which I have many pieces. It's intricate, told first on a small, limited scale, and then expands to a much broader concept. I want to keep it intimate, but I want to convey the devastating gravity of it, too. That being said, I wrote a narrow, narrow point of view on a very small scale for a very small character's story in the aftermath of the whistleblower's reveal. It's more novelette than short story (it's sitting at about 11.3k words), but you can find it over in my Short Stories tab.
Don't give up on me. It's been four years since I published, but I've been doing a lot of growing in the interim. Both personally and as a writer. The best is yet to come. <3
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