Synopsis
Young history teacher, Kendra Williams, has crossed the galaxy for love, only to find that neither her fiancée nor the desert world of Danelon IV live up to her expectations.
Then she encounters the irrepressible, wheelchair-using mech pilot, Aimee Westmorland, one of the many salvagers who scavenge in the great desert for broken-down mechs, and ventures out into the sands in search of new path through life. But what the two friends find might just have the potential to change the galaxy.

Background
The Salvager is a fun, lively, light-hearted science fiction story that is basically about two friends, Kendra Williams and Aimee Westmorland, and a large mech. I had an idea kicking around in my head for a story about big robots, because I’m a nerd and big robots are awesome, but I couldn’t settle on a character who grabbed my attention.

Then I became friends online with a very cool lady from Texas who followed me on Twitter and liked my first novel (always a good way to get in my good books). In chatting to her, I learned that she had been confined to a wheelchair from a very young age and I thought, "Wouldn’t it be cool if she had a giant mech to ride around in?"
Aghast at the lack of available mechs in the real world, the best I could manage was to provide a fictional one, and so the irrepressible, devil-may-care mech-pilot, Aimee Westmorland, was born. She did, however, get transferred from Texas to the distant desert planet of Danelon IV, and became defiantly Irish in the process. Mainly, if I’m being honest, because I thought that having her swear in Gaelic would be cool.
Kendra originally formed as the antithesis of Aimee; a slightly wispy, somewhat timid history teacher who could act as an opposite number for Aimee to bounce off, but the two soon took on lives of their own and embarked on a grand adventure that, some 103,000 words later, didn’t really resemble the story I’d originally been thinking about at all. Apart from the big robots - those are definitely here to stay.