MANIFESTATIONS
95,000 words | Paranormal Horror (Adult)
A year ago, a flurry of whispers crashed into Lucy’s mind and condensed into a single panicked word: Help.
Lucy Bromwell has to live up to the Bromwell legacy. To become a doctor like Dad, if not a surgeon like Mom. Somebody who can truly help others. But she just got academically suspended instead.
The only way to get back on track comes via Jane Shinter. After observing one of the empathic episodes that Lucy has endured since that whispered plea, the intimidating small business owner offers a summer internship. Jane needs help with an outbreak of ‘manifestations,’ phantasmic creatures composed of the residual emotions of the dead. And Jane needs to find her missing business partner—a powerful flora empath who disappeared on the exact day those whispers whisked into Lucy’s skull like wind through leaves.
Lucy arrives to her first on-site case determined to use the summer as nothing more than a bridge back to her old life. But Jane’s unspoken feelings for her missing business partner, as well as Lucy’s budding empathic powers, start pulling her into a world where ‘helping’ goes beyond the biological.
MANIFESTATIONS is an adult paranormal novel that merges the eerie magic of Krystal Sutherland’s House of Hollow with the humor and sneaky wholesomeness of Ursula Vernon’s The Twisted Ones.
Updates: I was a mentee under Jodie Lynne Zdrok with this book in 2021 for the Rogue Mentor program.
THE FACILITY
94,000 words | Sci-fi Horror (Adult)
Sed is an ‘Other-thing,’ a manifestation of the night over three centuries old. He’s also a prisoner of the Facility, which has trapped him in his human form and, unforgivably, a hideous orange jumpsuit.
Eve is a model guard, so far as the Facility knows. It’s only the second year of her three-decade rehabilitation sentence for petty theft.
Both are keen to escape to what’s left of Earth and return to surviving on their own. But when a revolt rocks the Facility, the chaos forces Sed and Eve to pursue their solo escapes together, even as newly freed Other-things unleash elemental powers, transforming the sterile station into a lush landscape.
Sed and Eve, caught between the Facility and the rebels, may finally have to stop running and start fighting to stay—to stay on the station, to stay alive, and perhaps even to stay together.
THE FACILITY is a sci-fi novel with a romance, V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie Larue blended with Eliot Schrefer’s The Darkness Outside Us.
Updates: In RevPit 2023, this manuscript was short listed by Carly Hayward and long listed by Michelle Rascon.
THE CYNOSURE BUTTON
35,000 words | Sci-fi Horror (Adult)
A.I. ghosts are real. 90-y/o Randall Harding saw one. In an anonymous online forum, he befriends other witnesses trying to spread the truth. But corrupt gov’t forces are circling. And the ghosts are recalling how they “died.” MURDERBOT x CREEPYPASTA