I'm beyond thrilled to announce that I am one of the 2020 winners of the Susan P. Bloom Children's Book Discovery Award!
The award honors unpublished, unagented children's book writers in New England. I submitted the first chapter of a suburban middle-grade fantasy of mine, along with a synopsis of the plot and a short biography.
STYX AND STONES, the project I submitted for consideration, follows twelve-year-old Alice Epler as she starts the seventh grade. She dreads it; she has miasma, which means can see spirits of the dead--eidola--and it freaks everyone else out. Her only friend is the eidolon of Gaius Iulius Caesar, and he doesn't count; he's not corporeal.
On the first day of school, Al sees a girl--a cute girl--she hasn't seen before. This is her chance; if Al can just befriend Nadine before she knows Al has miasma, Nadine will be caught in Al's friendship trap.
The plan goes south fast when Shaina, long-time bully, swoops in an interrupts Al's machinations. Al isn't ready to give up hope just yet, but at every turn, her attempts to thwart Shaina, ignore her miasma, and get to know Nadine only snowball into a worse and worse situation--one where if Al doesn't travel through the Underworld with no certain way back, everyone in town could lose their souls forever to a revenant.
Drawing on less widely known ancient Greek funerary practices and beliefs about the afterlife, STYX AND STONES is a story about embracing the parts of yourself society tells you not to. This is an #ownvoices project (because Al likes another girl, not because I see dead people).
I'd be remiss as a classicist if I didn't acknowledge at every opportunity that I used Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece by Sarah Iles Johnston for research and world-building inspiration and that my original knowledge and inspiration came from the class Death in the Ancient Mediterranean, taught by Carrie L. Sulosky-Weaver at the University of Pittsburgh. I'd also like to acknowledge the help and guidance of Dana Chidiac who served as my mentor for this project while I worked on it as part of my graduation requirements for my MFA at Simmons University.
I had so much fun combining my two favorite things in the world (ancient civilization and children's fantasy novels starring LGBTQ+ protags) and dragging the complete manuscript over the finish line, and I'm beyond thrilled that the Children's Book Committee enjoyed it as well!
