Can’t get to school on time. Crap. Don’t talk to my best friend because we slept together and then he moved. Double crap. Having weird recurring dreams about things that seem so familiar but are so twisted, so dark, that they can’t possibly be real. Triple crap.
This is…was…my life. The whole lot of it.
Then his face turned up in school. Like déjà vu, like a dream. Because I’ve seen him before, in those dreams. Yeah, yeah, yeah, “I’ve seen him before in my dreams,” sounds like a bad rom-com. You don’t need to tell me, I’m living it.
I’m also living a lie. My mother isn’t my mother, my world isn’t my world, I’m from somewhere else. Somewhere new, but much older than the Earth I’ve come to know. What’s that you say? I have a sister and she lives in this other place and she’s an evil ol’ tyrant hellbent on death, destruction, and finding me? This boy that showed up is here to groom me for…war?
Well, I’m in trouble. That much hasn’t changed.
Harper Falls has been bumbling around in my brain for about a decade, and it’s gone through numerous drafts and revisions. It’s been very important to me to get this story right, and to get Amelia right. 17 is a difficult place to be, and sometimes it’s quite easy to overwrite or underwrite an age like that. She’s both strong and weak, vulnerable and hot-headed, angry and at peace, and her story reflects the learning curve of a teenager thrown into a highly fantastical situation. Harper Falls seeks to deconstruct some of the tropes in fantasy, grounding them in reality, relationships, and the psychology of "evil" and what that means to each person.
About me?
I grew up in a small city in New Hampshire. Yes, it is that small state in the North East you likely forget about, or perhaps the one you confuse with Vermont. After spending years being fairly uncoordinated at sports, I found theatre, film, and writing to be a haven of creativity and life. Following high school, I attended a small art school in Philadelphia and obtained a shiny BFA, then moved across the country to the sunny streets of Los Angeles to write and use my stellar phone skills to order production lunches as a PA. And thus, here I am. I’m a self-proclaimed nerd and have a deep, unyeilding love for science fiction, fantasy, Shakespeare, D&D, Oxford commas, dogs, my dog, dogs, and dogs.