My Projects

 Because You Laughed


A short story; this made top five on inkpop.com in August 2010 and was voted Short Story of the Year. 

I’m the one you don’t notice. I’m not the leader of the crowd, or the one they tease. I’m the one who laughs.

None of this is my fault. I’m not the bully. I’m not the one who forms the cliques. I only want what we all want. Acceptance. Friends. The freedom to just be me, and to have people like me. Yet somehow, it’s not happening. I don’t know why. After a whole semester at East River High I still have no friends.

You can’t blame me for wanting Hailey to talk to me. You can’t blame me for ignoring Carla; after all, everyone else does.  

But maybe you can blame me for laughing.

I thought it would be harmless. A little joke, a ticket to the popular crowd.

But I’ve discovered laughing can have consequences you could never imagine. 

WANDER

My NaNo 2010 novel, the first one I completed. It rose to rank 100 on inkpop before I shelved it. 

If he wanted you dead, you'd be dead by now.
He wants you alive.
He wants you to fail.

Ida and Wander have been best friends for almost a month now. They’ve exchanged countless emails and chatted on MSN nearly every day. 

The thing is… they’ve never met. 

On the day that they finally arrange to ‘meet’, through a webcam chat, everything goes wrong. In the middle of their conversation Wander is kidnapped and Ida is threatened with the same fate if she tells the police.

Armed with only an address, Ida is determined to rescue Wander, a Muslim forced into an arranged marriage. What she doesn’t know is that she’s the third person to try to rescue Wander, and the only one to survive. Travelling with her new friend into the United States, Ida begins to realize that Wander isn’t the innocent kidnap victim she seemed to be. 

Across the ocean in the war-torn Middle East, two other teens battle to see through the secrets that force them to distrust each other. They’re being manipulated, forced to work against each other under the will of a madman watching their every move. 

It’s a matter of trust, with thousands of lives hanging in the balance. But choices are never clear, and sometimes the only option seems to be…

Betrayal. 


Simulate
My current WIP. I began it about a year ago and nearly finished it before leaving for university. Unfortunately I didn't manage to write at all over the school year, so it's still at 83k where it was before university started. I hope to finish it soon, then edit it over the summer and begin querying in the fall. (NOTE: the cover here is old, and with a previous title. Hopefully I'll have a new cover up soon)

In the year 2500, virtual reality is the new daydreaming. To sixteen year old Astrid, it's a living nightmare.


Europe is at war with America, and Astrid (the most intelligent teen on the planet) is the ultimate weapon. Using the mental simulation known as The Web to pre-fight all the battles and plan the perfect strategy, Astrid has led America to four years of victory. But all this changes when Astrid meets a strange boy inside the Web who kisses her... then kills her.


Astrid wakes up in real life to find that America has lost their first battle, thanks to the boy. Turns out he can steal information from her mind during the simulation and pass it along to the Europeans. Now every time Astrid enters the Web the boy is there, stealing information before killing her yet again. Astrid resolves to stay out of the Web, even if that means losing her brother and almost-boyfriend to a new round of military conscription.


Then the boy appears in real life, but he doesn't seem to remember anything he's done in the Web. With the President desperate for victory, Astrid has to choose between killing her murderer-- who may well be innocent-- or watching society crumble around her.