Wednesday Wanderings

Happy (slightly belated) book birthday to Scylla and Charybdis!  My sprawling, epic science fiction novel came out in April of 2018.  It garnered some lovely reviews, and I'm still terribly proud of it ... especially as I never thought of scifi as my wheelhouse.  It was a book I didn't really want to write at first:  it started as a short story which editors kept saying needed to be a novel, and oh, I fought that.  I also never expected, when I started writing, how important the homebase of the story would be.  When I started writing Scylla and Charybdis (as a book), I envisioned it as a milieu novel, an exploration of a universe undertaken by an outsider.  But as I wrote the opening sequences, I realized how important Anaea's home was to her, and how it would inform the whole rest of the story.

So much happened in the writing of that book I never pictured.  I had no idea the character of Flick would pop into existence, all but fully formed from the first sentences.  I didn't realize how deeply I would end up delving into the politics of the warlords and the matriarchs.  I didn't know where Anaea would finally find her place, only that we would discover it together.