All Things Fantasy
Avid reader, space enthusiast, and dragon tamer. Writing has been my passion for years. I use words as a method of expression and way to give readers hope.
My writing/editing/reading buddies include a not-so-friendly German Shepherd named Pfeffer and a skittish bearded dragon named Thorin “Pancake” Oakenshield.
My favorite genres include but are not limited to all kinds of fantasy, sci-fi of the space opera variety, historical fiction, graphic novels, and select nonfiction and poetry.
Tropes I enjoy:
- Pilots, especially female ones
- Settings written as well as characters
- Disability representation
- Underwater sci-fi
- #ownvoices
- Con artists
- Dragons
Favorite authors:
- Susanna Clarke
- Olivia A. Cole
- C. G. Drews
- Victor Hugo
- C. S. Lewis
- Lisa Nicodemus Lyons
- Brandon Sanderson
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Elizabeth Wein
- Francesca Zappia
I’m not a fan of romance, though I don’t mind the occasional romantic subplot. If you really want me to ship two characters, they must be people first.
Dystopian stories aren’t my thing.
No sex scenes.
Please no excessive swearing (e.g. the movie “Bright”).
Origami Swan is a young adult fantasy novel complete at 92,000 words. Like Akemi Dawn Bowman’s Starfish, it’s about social anxiety, and like Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap and Emily X. R. Pan’s The Astonishing Color of After, it’s about the struggles of mental illness set in a parallel dimension.
Agatha Jordan is used to people walking out of her life, and she never intends to do that to anybody else. She had plans for the summer—celebrate her high school graduation, visit the hiking trails across the Midwest, and work in the garage with her dad. When a call from her estranged mother leads to a car accident in the country, Agatha is stranded in the ghost town of Gateway. Her hometown has always tried to cover up the existence of the ghost town and the Labyrinth walls beyond. Over the decades, many people have gone in and never come out.
But Agatha remembers bits of the Labyrinth from her childhood, and she escaped then. Drawn to rediscover the world she first explored with her mom, she enters the Labyrinth only to find herself trapped with no cell phone signal and no way out.
Within the passageways, she encounters a girl with a guidebook, a boy who likes making origami, a bookworm who enjoys philosophy, and some elusive monsters. Her only problem—she doesn’t know how to talk to any of them, except maybe the monsters. Good with directions but bad with people, she navigates the passageways and the ever-confusing human interaction. But there’s more to traveling than taking the correct turns. The Labyrinth enjoys messing with people’s paths. And their minds. If Agatha can figure out how to separate illusion from reality, monsters from friends, she just might be able to find her center—what she wants to do next with her life—that will lead her home.
(I have been querying this novel for over a year, and the agents who requested it remarked that Agatha didn’t have enough influence over the climax. I want to do better.)
CHAPTER ONE
BEYOND LIMITATIONS
Red stands for happiness, blue for melancholy, and orange for rebellion. I always apply a bright shade of lipstick before working at the garage as a way to gauge how much my mood does or doesn’t change from start to finish. Some of the best days start as blue and end as red.
I select a nice dark purple—purple stands for days of uncertainty. That and I like the color.
I grab my jean jacket from the foot of my bed, slip it on, and head into our home garage, ready for Dad and I drive to work down the road. I stop at the sight of two cars rather than the usual one. Dad’s gray-white pickup is a familiar sight, but there’s another vehicle, a twenty-something blue Passat. Maybe Mom dropped by for a visit. Why would Dad let her park in the garage?
Not a second later, he comes in behind me, wearing one of his jogging t-shirts and a pair of shorts. His hair’s all messed up too, so he must’ve just got back from his morning run. He’s carrying a plate of bacon in one hand, and with the other he tosses me a set of keys. “Happy graduation, Agatha! Wanna take her for a spin?”
I clutch the keys for a moment. He got me a car? Ever since I started working at the garage, before I could even drive, I’d dreamed for a vehicle I could call my own, and he actually did it—he gave me one. I slam into a hug, nearly knocking the plate of bacon from his hands.
He chuckles. “All this for bacon? Guess I should make it more often.”
“Dad!” I pull back and smile. The car’s not exactly new—there’s a couple scratches on the hood—but considering it’s a gift from my dad, the mechanic, I can trust it. My very own car. “Thank you.”
I primarily write YA but would like to write MG at some point, and I’m currently working on the rough draft of on an adult sci-fi novel.
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