My Mind Children

Completed Mind-Children:

SOUL BOUND
Eco-centric, YA urban fantasy
Think PRINCESS MONONOKE meets UNDERWORLD
Lots of shapeshifting & animal rights, a plethora of dichotomies (science vs religion, science vs nature, nature vs religion), and two kick-ass female leads in one.

Eighteen-year-old Falon Byrom is soul bound: her human soul is entwined with another. That other soul, beastly and wild, belongs to Wolf, and they share everything—Falon’s body and mind—and agree on very little. Wolf has a particular disdain for Falon’s vegetarianism and Falon’s not exactly a fan of Wolf’s animal urges that always seem to get her into trouble (she’s still scarred after biting the boy in third grade who tried to steal her lunch and marking her territory on the playground). But one thing they do both agree on: they want to live in peace protecting their forest.

Though their life isn’t always peaceful, as countless poachers and construction companies encroach on their safe haven, that threat they can deal with. Tormenting and terrifying poachers with Wolf’s massive lupine form, sticking oranges in the exhaust pipes of construction equipment—it’s nothing they can’t handle. But when two supernatural strangers show up, slaughtering the poachers Falon had been tracking, she and Wolf are in over their heads. Their arrival in the Refuge was no coincidence. They’re after the blood of the soul bound.

Barely escaping with their life, Falon and Wolf discover that their willful ignorance of the world outside their forest is costing the other soul bound their lives, their kind caught in the middle of a war over the hidden supernatural world. And Falon’s blood could be the key to ending it—if she steps in. She’d have to leave her forest to do so, and the outside world has never been anything but cruel. But picking a side might mean Falon can save her kind. Picking the wrong side could doom them all to extinction.     

Mind-Children in Progress:

THE RUNNERS
Post-Apocalyptic YA Sci-fi.
Think SETTLERS OF CATAN meets ZOMBIES, RUN!

Excerpt:

Chapter One: Broken 

            “Rook Haxley, you’re going to pick those veins dry if you don’t slow down! Save some for the rest of us.”

            Rook’s pickaxe arcs over her head and she grunts as it punctures the rock wall, breaking off a piece of iron ore. She bends to pick it up, ignoring the ache in her spine, and tosses it into her wheelbarrow. Rook makes sure to hold the gaze of the miner that yelled at her as the satisfying clunk of rock against metal marks her fifth full haul of the day.

            The average is two.

            The miner shakes his head and turns his back on her, slinging his pickaxe into his mostly empty barrow. They all had families to feed. Rook cared most about feeding her own.

            Stretching her back and arms, Rook feels the angry glares upon her person like a sizzling heat. The pit mine has fewer and fewer veins to pick from every month. And no one is happy that she seems to get to the new ones first. But she always makes sure to leave some ore behind for others—as soon as she knows she has enough to put food on her family’s table.

            Ignoring the air of contempt closing in around her, Rook sheathes her pickaxe in her weathered belt and starts the long uphill push to the Prospector‘s shack. Her old shoes slip on the dusty path leading out of the pit and her petite frame fights to push the weight of the full barrow ahead of her. She frowns at another miner who seems to delight in her struggle. He laughs when her feet trip over a loose rock and she rakes her teeth over her bottom lip at him in reply. He knows perfectly well which curse word it signifies. Outside of the mine Rook prides herself on her manners. But they have no place in the pit, amongst the hardened men who don’t think she has any business being there. Rook loves proving them wrong.

APOTHECARIUM
YA Fantasy. Plenty of potions, plants, passion, and peril! 

Ever since seventeen-year-old Sofia was little, Baba Nuna has seen her future in the tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. It is always the same: "Your name shall be known throughout the Kingdom." Sofia didn't think much of her grandmother's prophecies, until she is recruited as an apprentice apothecary at the world-renowned Apothecarium. As her skills quickly surpass Master Volet's, suddenly Baba's predictions seem to be coming true.

But for a much different reason.

When word of her famous concoctions reach royal ears, Sofia is summoned to the capital of Balka to administer one of her potions to the ailing King Madin. But when he ends up poisoned instead of cured, Sofia is accused of attempted assassination and treason.

Scheduled to be executed, Sofia’s only chance at redemption is to find the plants needed for a remedy that does not yet exist. One that only she can create. To save the king and the Apothecarium, and to keep her head firmly attached to her neck, Sofia must journey to find the ingredients for the cure and figure out who framed her.

THE PRINCE OF GRIFFINS
MG Fantasy. Strong Mongolian and Russian influences.