The New Dawn series started as a screenplay, then a series of novellas that I workshopped, stripped for parts, and expanded into novels. In the expansion process, I realized that the first half of Book 1 had a different villain than the second half, and the draft was split into two: The Disappeared and Sequestered. That’s why the first four days of the two books overlap.
About half way through writing the first book, I got terribly stuck with my characters, and so I did something that always made me happy. I made a fanfic. You see, by this point in the process, I knew my characters very well. I had two full novellas, I had scenes from multiple books slowly filling up files in a google drive. I had the whole series plotted. And yet, I was stuck.
And so I wrote a story called “Festival of Pairing.” I wrote it as a fan fiction of my own work. In fanfic, you don’t have to introduce the characters or explain the world. You just write the story because the audience already knows it. In a matter of weeks, I produced the nearly complete first draft of Premonition, the story of Hawk meeting and rescuing his Prince. The story of Danny and Sky getting past their inhibitions, of Tray and Saskia deepen their love, and the story of Amanda finding hope that her future wasn’t lost. "The Festival of Pairing" was the first fully drafted book of the series, and I decided to slide it into the 7th slot, where I think it fits beautifully.
The story has evolved significantly since that first draft, but at the heart of it is the power of hope. The hope that there are those in the world that love us, and that tomorrow will be better than today is a driving force.
The culture the crew encounters in this story is struggling to keep their population up, and homophobic sentiments permeate the culture. Same sex couple keep to the shadows, they’re bullied into false marriages to keep up appearances, and sometimes they’re beaten or killed. When I wrote this story, I was still very new to queer cultures and identities. I was still transitioning from closet ally into a confident one. I worried my books would be rejected because they had queer characters, and I hadn’t even come to realize my own queer identity yet.
I thought about evolving the story and removing the homophobia subplot, but just because I have evolved in thinking doesn’t mean the rest of the world is there. Acknowledgment and acceptance were important steps for me to take, and this story is like a time capsule looking into a fear that I am now past.
I didn’t set out to write a story about two parents learning to accept their queer child. I set out to write a fanfic. A sci-fi adventure with a cast that I loved in a world where supernatural things seem to happen all around them. But the hope for tomorrow comes in the love and acceptance of others. There’s power in everything we do, and you never know when your hello is someone else’s hope for tomorrow.
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PREMONITION
COMING DECEMBER 5th
Seeing the future is not the same as saving it.
When the first premonition hits, Amanda thinks it’s a hallucination. She doesn’t have psychic power; she echoes the powers of others. Her sudden ability to see the future has done little to help her crew prepare.
Can Amanda’s borrowed powers give the crew the edge the need?
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