The Pursuit of Getting Published (and other stuff)

I Blame Taylor Swift (Straps on feminist skirt) Yes, I've had time to remember my many inspirations for writing a YA sci-fi/romance novel. Taylor Swift was one of them and she contributed to it...not directly, though. I do have a couple of her albums, though - full disclosure - not because I sometimes get the feeling to listen to some Taylor. (Fine, I have three of her albums, Fearless is the best, IMHO) She was able to relay in a very dorky, but honest way what teenage naivete feels like. For me, a big dumb male, the first album (Fearless) was a heart on the sleeve offering of what exactly goes on in a typical 16 year old girl's head. It's like entering a fantasy world. From this I began to extrapolate how the other half of humanity thinks. I also started thinking about the different lives the two genders lead. Gender, Fear, and Love   Your average common white male hardly ever needs to fear anything. If I ask any white man when he last feared for his safety...

CONSTANCE’S JOURNAL No Date, Random Note Love acts on us all. It binds our insides, unites ends ripped asunder by anger, hate or loss, it gives hope where none was previously. Love propels us; filled with ignorance and fear, to the course of its choosing. Love is strange and familiar all at once. From afar it is known and knowable, we recognize it on the other’s face, we feel it as they feel it, yet once scrutinized and dissected by questions, and hazed by logic, love becomes a weird thing. It’s elemental small parts do not make sense, its binding force invisible, and the truth of its existence contrary to macro version we all want to have. It becomes a mere aberration of the human conscience – the human condition. It is quantum dissonance with an ultimate truth unknowable but to our feelings and emotions. Love is the dome we all live under; its stars sparkling in the darkness of its expanse, giving us wonder and a sense that all is not as simple, finite and fated as...

Constance survived the end of the world. Not many did. She's spent the last three years alone in Cold Spring, New York. She sees a few migrants heading south to the city and beyond. She always turns them down when they ask her to go with them. She hears of people turning into savages down there. Her shotgun repelled one that wandered north a short while go. One spring evening, she sees something emerge from the Hudson, lumbering to her door soaking wet. Alexander seems trustworthy at first. He tells her he's traveling south. He has lots of military gear, lots of confidence, and a cute smile. But in the back of her mind, Constance knows no one who survived the apocalypse is untainted; especially a man who's far too comfortable with a shotgun pointed in his face. Alexander's entrance into her life forces Constance to decide if she can do the one thing she's feared for three years: leave the relative safety of Cold Spring. If she does, it's a likely death ...