Projects

~Chronically Under Construction~

Short Stories

• PLAYING LIZARD
• Kindergartener Shiloh has a secret – she’s actually a millenia-old alien, sent on the first wave of an Earth invasion. Over the years, Shiloh has possessed hundreds of host bodies on hundreds of conquered planets, and she has a bad track record of getting too attached to her inhabited lives; during the last invasion, she even attempted to intervene in order to protect her reptilian host-born children. But this time, this planet, Shiloh will watch the world burn for her original species. Even if fellow kindergartener Alyssa is just so darn cute.
• Status: Finished

• SPACE MAN
• In the summer of her thirteenth year, Lauren and her eccentric mother move to a small town full of dead people. Lauren gets a job at a convenience store run by a 1940s screen siren, and she falls fast in crush with an 1880s farm boy who dreams of flying machines. Yet she remains transfixed by the mysterious Space Man – that silent astronaut in a space suit who stands out against all the cornfields and countryside. Who is Space Man, and why does he seem to have an interest in Lauren?
• Status: Finished

• DAISY AND THE DRAGON EGG
• Flaky heiress Daisy exchanged her dragon egg for a fistful of magic seeds at All Things Magic, that centuries-old pawnshop dealing exclusively in magical artifacts. But the seeds won’t grow – and now she wants her egg back. New owner Jonathan better return that egg, lest Daisy buy the pawnshop right out from under him and convert the shop into a laundromat. Unfortunately, the egg has already been pawned and traded, from an unscrupulous bandit to a dotty old wizard to an evil queen from another dimension. Daisy and Jonathan have to hurry, because that dragon egg’s about to hatch, and those seeds might just grow.
• Status: Brainstorming

Longer Works

• KILL THE LAST ONE
• Teenage slacker Casey only wants to smoke his remaining days of high school away in a pot-fueled haze, but first the lights flicker and then most of the people disappear and finally gigantic, spider-like aliens appear on the horizon of his hometown. Televisions broadcast a strange message: Welcome to the Mock Universe. If you want to leave, kill the last one. The problem? Casey was the last to arrive, or rather the last one, and now he’s trying to survive in a bizarre alternate dimension full of menacing aliens and shell-shocked young adults who want very badly to go home. And he’s trying to protect younger brothers Cameron and Evan while he’s at it.
• Status: WIP

• SPIDER AND BRIAR
• Beyond the dark forest, before the ogre lands, there lies a haunted valley, where every twenty years the human villagers must sacrifice a young girl to a murderous demon known only as the Scarlet Lady. Spider is the latest in a long history of such sacrifices, but the Lady does not want her, as she only eats maidens who are happy, beautiful and clever. Spider is apathetic, ugly and illiterate, so the hungry Lady embarks on a plot to adopt and better her. Spider has two choices: remain unhappy, or fall prey to a strange demon who is at once ghost, witch, dragon and the haunted valley itself.
• Status: WIP

• CALLIOPE ON MAPLE STREET
• In early 1960s rural Pennsylvania, spirited preteen Susan reads comic books by flashlight and creates make-believe worlds in the woods behind her house. Then her new babysitter Penny turns out to be Calliope the Greek muse of epic poetry, who begrudgingly becomes Susan’s muse. That’s not even the shocking part. When writer’s ideas are epic enough, Calliope has the ability to make fantasy reality – which explains the mermaids in the cornfields, dinosaurs in the woods, dragons in the barn and aliens next door.
• Status: Brainstorming

• JEZEBEL DEFEATS THE UNIVERSE
• Jezebel is the best librarian the Interdimensional Library has ever seen: well read, organized, an avid consumer of tea. Blue is a rakish magician who steals a strange little robot boy from the Interdimensional Council, inciting their wrath. Blue’s next target is a book in the Interdimensional Library – a very important book, a book that may just be the key to saving his dying home world. Naturally, Jezebel interrupts his thievery and causes the spell to go wrong: the results could not be direr, as Blue loses his magic and Jezebel’s head gets turned into a fox’s head (always a risk factor with spells). The Council, never to be outdone in sheer ineptness, mistakes her for a magician and a thief. Now she’s on bounty posters in every galaxy in every dimension across time memoriam – it’s Jezebel against the universe.
• Status: Brainstorming

Key

• Brainstorming: Still mentally processing the story idea, but fully intent on writing the story eventually. May have even written a few paragraphs already, but not 100% committed to the writing process.
• WIP: Working on the first draft.
• Revising: Finished the first draft. Working on 10 more drafts. Getting feedback from crits. Generally spazzing out.
• Finished: Does not mean I’m actually finished, because I’m always revising. If my stories were in bookstores, I would totally be that person lurking in the aisles and red-penning her own books. No, “finished” here simply means that I’m sick to death of looking at this story. And that there is a satisfactory beginning, middle and end.