Hit 20k on my WIP! Here have some gifs of happy courtesy the BBC!

I have the first chapter of my current WIP, the latest attempt to get my Zodiac story right, and I really like how it’s coming around. I’m about sixty pages in, and this is only first ten, but the whole thing’s plotted out—no guarantees it’ll actually predict the result, though!

The Roaring Silence: A Zodiac Protectorate Novel

Chapter One

Outside Wilmington, Illinois—April 8, 1923

Harrison let the dirt fall through his fingers and onto his grandfather’s casket. He felt a tear forming at the corner of his eye, but he blinked it away and returned to Suzanne. He didn’t look at her, but stood beside her. Knowing what he needed as she always seemed to, she took his hand; her thumb worked circles into the back of his knuckles, just as she would whenever he came from the feed store, stressed about the day’s work or meager pay. “It won’t be much to live on,” he’d always tell her, but she’d simply take his hand, put it to her cheek, and massage the back of his hand as she insisted, “It’ll be enough.”

Harrison’s mother Sharon hadn’t gone to the interment; she’d gone back to the house after the service to prepare dinner for the extended family who’d come for the funeral. Aunt Mavis, ever the spider in her sister’s boot, had insisted on staying in their father’s farmhouse instead of with her sister and family. She and her husband had claimed that they didn’t want to crowd or be underfoot, but Harrison would bet a full month’s wages that they were packing up their truck with anything they deemed valuable every moment they thought they wouldn’t be caught. No other purpose could have drawn them back across three states so quickly.

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It’s been ages since I’ve been on here. Believe me, I am acutely aware of that fact. A lot’s changed since then—I’ve put Codename Eagle Chick on hiatus because I’m working on yet another draft of Zodiac, which I just can’t seem to let go. Maybe it’s the whole first-love/novel thing, but I’ve done so much work on world building for this, I just have to see it through. This time, however, it’s not set in contemporary, but in 1920s Chicago: the height of prohibition and the resulting organized crime empire that stems from Al Capone. Also quite a lot of subtle intersectional feminism. It’s fantastic. I’ll post an excerpt in a while; I just need to do another round or two of editing on the first chapter before it’ll be post-worthy.

In other news, I’m graduating from college in six weeks (!!!), hence the hiatus. I’m trying to finish out college with a bang. Afterward, I wanted to teach English abroad. I was thinking Asia, but with North Korea’s latest threat of war, I think I’ll put that off until, hopefully, things cool off a bit.

So, what’s been happening in your lives?

Sorry about the hiatus; I got a really bad head cold a few weeks back and have been playing catch up with writing and schoolwork ever since. My regular, fandom-filled tumblr’s had a lot of activity because of it. But the one that takes effort to run? Not so much. Anyway, onward to book covers.

We’ve all seen those really horrid book covers that authors make for their own books. Literary agents complain about them all the time, and don’t get me started on the ones we see on self-pubbed books. Yeesh.

However,

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