Hi there!

I’m your resident cat-herding, houseplant-growing, iced-tea-guzzling, kitchen-experimenting, up-till-4am-painting mad scientist hermit writer, and I’m trying not to write a boring first blog post! (It’s hard because I’m not entirely sure who will be reading these, so I can’t tell what would be interesting to them/you. But I’m trying anyway!)

Obligatory fuzzy animal alert, because we have priorities around here: I have a cat named Tesla. He’s a white patch tabby and he’s huge and he likes to yell at me for writing instead of giving him snuggles. Photo incoming at the end of the post ^^

My obsession with writing goes way back: I’ve been writing long-form fantasy since I was ten years old. I finished a lot of stuff back then, too, and even did multiple editing stages on most of them, often rewriting the entire novel in the process! I was a strange teenager.

Current project

Right now I’m working on a fantasy novel called Melody Moss and the Pale Crow. The quick teaser: it’s about a young witch who risks her life every night to protect her town from evil spirits–until she meets one that, instead of fighting her, pleads for mercy, and she decides to save it instead.

It’s either middle grade or YA. I’m leaning towards (youngish) YA; I probably won’t be able to tell for sure until after a revision pass or two. I wrote it for my twelve-year-old self, but I was also reading adult fiction when I was twelve, so honestly all bets are off.

Melody’s character arc is what has me thinking her book is YA, though. She’s a kid who’s been forced by circumstance to grow up too fast and take on too much responsibility, and she’s afraid people don’t take her seriously, so she puts up a very mature persona and has a hard time letting people help her when she needs them. I’ve been thinking she should be 15 or 16 instead of 13. It seems like a teenager kind of conflict (more than a kid kind of conflict, that is; plenty of adults also struggle with this…).

Plans

After I finish the first draft of MMPC, I plan to work on my other MG/YA novel, The Green Goliath, to give me some time away from MMPC before I start revisions. It’s about a kid who lives in a world where nature magic used to power technology instead of electricity, until one day it broke loose. Now the world is covered in plants, kudzu-style, and using magic is forbidden… but that doesn’t stop Kai, especially when his powers offer him a golden opportunity to chase down the local cryptid.

Kai is basically kid MacGyver with magic and I love writing him so much. His major driving trait is that he is a very smart and confident kid who can’t stand being bored, so he makes a beeline for anything interesting, even if it’s risky or breaks rules. He has this really fun tendency to fail comically and just get up and dust himself off, he’s hard to ruffle that way.

GG was my NaNoWriMo project last year, but it only has about 14.5k words written because I happened to catch the plague right before November started and it knocked me out for most of the month. Whoops!

Speaking of NaNo–that’s next post. 😉

Tesla

He is a sleepy friend, and very soft and warm.

That’s all from me tonight!

Wordfully yours,

–Jade