Here are all the words that currently hold my focus.
Weekly Shorty Stories
I have the intention in 2024 to write a new short story every week – to end with 52 short stories by December 31st.
Will they all be good? Likely not.
Will some potentially get me published for the first time ever?
Here’s hoping.
Update – April 1st – After writing 8 new stories in 8 weeks, March was an insane month with 0 new stories written.
Revised goal is to cut back to a new story every two weeks, with 26 finished short stories by the end of the year.
Current count is still 8 – hoping to be at 10 by May 1st!
1 – We Are The Giants We Fear
2 – Jump
3 – The Link Between There and Here
4 – The Wedding Present
5 – Dream Job
6 – Where Grandad Goes
7 – Bang Whimper
8 – The Wolf
Suddenly Normal
When you are dealing with the grief of losing almost everyone you love at a young age, navigating love during your teen years while attending funerals for people you don’t even know all becomes, weirdly, suddenly, normal.
Suddenly Normal spans the thirty-five years of Elemenope Chernovsky’s life after the heavy emotional losses she endures as a child. It is a darkly comic tale of a girl born to first generation Russian immigrants who is raised solely by her father in a house where the one thing they cannot speak about with each other is the emptiness they both feel.
Like Jennifer Niven’s All The Bright Places, this story of grief and loss is also a story about finding love through that grief. Told in a series of flashbacks and flashforwards as contemporary Ellie mourns a recent death in her life, we learn about what it was like being raised by her father, about finding solace in the grief of others and about the two great loves of her life, the traditional boy meets girl and the more complicated love she shares with her asexual best friend.
Manuscript History:
Written 2007 to 2020.
Literary Fiction – 82 000 words.
This was the book that took over my brain as interest in my first manuscript, Group, was picking up and I focused on writing little else.
Life happened – divorce, career – and I wrote myself into a corner with how to navigate the love story with the best friend.
Attempts in 2013 and 2017 to pick the manuscript back up were unsuccessful.
Then the pandemic happened. I picked it up again in April of 2020 and found my way out of the corner, completing the first draft in May of 2020.
After two years of edits and amazing beta readers, I started actively querying in 2022, looking for the perfect home for this manuscript.
Group
The teachers at Ravendale have to go. After band competitions, the music teacher drives the children home while drunk The music teacher has driven children home after band competitions while drunk and another teacher may or may not be a puppy killer. And when a student is struck by lightning, the French teacher mishandles the scene in a near-fatal manner. In a word, they are inept.
Burt has an idea: he and his friends should band together secretly, unite unseen, target the teachers individually and, one by one, drive them insane. With Burt leading Group, the boys start to enjoy one success after another, driving the teachers they do not like from the school and keeping the ones they can tolerate around. As they continue to shape the school in their own image, the one thing Burt – who is always two steps ahead of everyone – doesn’t foresee is how the power they begin to wield is subtly corrupting them from within, a corruption that will eventually result in a massive fire in the dormitories and the death of one of their classmates.
Inspired in form by Catch-22, the narrative relentlessly jumps back and forth in time over the school year and the reader is left to piece together the true timeline of events leading up to the novel’s climax and a tragedy that brings all their work crashing down around them.
Manuscript History:
Written 2001 to 2003.
Literary Fiction – 97 500 words.
Queried 8 Agents in 2007 – picked up representation within 4 days of sending queries.
Interest from Penguin pending some edits.
Edits conflicted with, and eventually gave way to, the next manuscript, Suddenly Normal.
Life happened – marriage, child, career – one year contract with agent dropped off, the manuscript has been on the shelf ever since.
I am currently actively querying.
Marlow Durand and the Armies of the Continuance (Five Book Series)
What if every haunted place on Earth is interconnected on another plane of existence; every evil haunting a part of a demonic spirit army’s concerted effort to break through and destroy our world?
17-year-old Marlow Durand is serving time and mopping floors in a juvenile correction centre when he finds himself in the middle of a raid to capture a high-ranking demon. His assistance in the capture introduces him to The Network, a band of protectors united throughout history by one goal: protect the portals between our worlds, at all costs.
This is Lev Grossman’s magician Quentin re-imagined as Rick Deckard, thrust into a world where everything we’ve learned from The Exorcist and Paranormal Activity is just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s a little dark but I am having a lot of fun writing it and hopefully that will come shining through.
Manuscript History:
Started writing December 2021 – WIP.
Literary Fiction with science fiction and horror elements.
Book One of the five book series to be completed by September, 2024.
Stars
Working door-to-door sales as a summer job may not sound glamourous, but, well, there’s no getting around it, it isn’t. But the lifestyle around the work kept us coming back summer after summer in the late 90’s.
Stars is the story of a group of university-aged friends who come together for one last summer of celebrating friendship, finding love and preparing for whatever the cosmos has in store for them after their time together is over.
Manuscript History:
Started writing December 2021 – WIP.
Literary Fiction.
Goebbels The Turkey
What started out as a writing prompt to combat the blank page at the start of December of 2021 turned into a full blown story and online collaborative writing experiment.
You can see all the details on the One Word blog here.
Manuscript History:
Written December 2021 to November 2022.
Literary Fiction – Online Collaborative Writing Experiment.