Current Projects
SECONDHAND STARDUST, a speculative upmarket love story exploring identity, yearning, redemption, and what the hell makes a soulmate, anyway.
The Pitch: In a dystopian future, reincarnation is real, verifiable by seers and an app, and the race is on for a group of soulmates to find one another and sort out their karma before they’re kidnapped by brutes or billionaires as the lights dim on Planet Earth.
(Big, Dynastic Soap with an Ensemble Cast: Fallout meets Sense8.)
Status: Book One (SECONDHAND STARDUST) is complete at 101,500 words and works as a standalone novel. Book Two (IN THE BARDO) is complete at 90,700 words and complements Book One. Both novels are in final revision. Book Three (CLOSE THE LOOP) is outlined to series conclusion. Pitch deck below.
SECONDHAND STARDUST
By 2089, one in ten people have been born “marked,” with total recall of their past lives. The iBodhi app functions as a soulmate matchmaker, and gifted seers claim nearly everyone has been reincarnated and can also find salvation in finding their soulmates. The phenomenon takes a dying world by storm, captivating people starved for connection, meaning, truth, and escape. But as with many movements that threaten the social order, the backlash is inevitable and harsh. Gangs of brutes hunt the marked across the wastelands of the former U.S., making an escapist party drug from their blood. And the morbidly wealthy, who’ve decamped to artificial islands off the East Coast, are convinced that the marked hold the keys to immortality. Or at least a more interesting weekend.
Against this savage, dystopian landscape, a group of new adults, their souls entwined through centuries and lifetimes, embark on perilous journeys to find one another. Naive Max begins his quest for his one true love but ends it struggling to hold onto himself. Has-been rocker Vivian, torn between her steadfast partner and the dazzling young man who claims to be her real soulmate, will learn what it means to be selfless. And Max’s long-lost love, Saima, pushes through grief to find hope in a most unlikely, dangerous place.
Will they find each other before the brutes or billionaires do? And if they manage to reconnect against steep odds, do they have everything (and everyone) they need to “close the loop?” Through a quirky and compassionate lens, Secondhand Stardust probes the human and societal fallout – absurd, beguiling, and frightening – if reincarnation became real and our soulmates aren’t who we think they are.
WHEN WE WERE THE ALGORITHM, a speculative horror-comedy exploring the charms and perils of nostalgia, with plenty of dark humor and more 90s pop-culture than anyone asked for, probably.
The Pitch: When a disillusioned Gen X single mom finds a portal to a 1995 video store, it’s an escape hatch to the best years of her life – until she learns monsters from the horror section are following her back home, risking her daughter’s safety and forcing a reckoning with the true cost of nostalgia.
(Escapist Magical Realism with an Emotional Core.)
Status: 24,000-word novella complete, currently being expanded into a full novel. Full draft ETA autumn 2026. Pitch deck below.
The story behind SECONDHAND STARDUST:
My boss at my first “real” job was a pretty interesting cat. He and I occasionally drove to meetings together, bullshitting about all manner of philosophical topics. Once he told me about a recurring nightmare he had, in which he was shot while disembarking from a train car at a concentration camp. He said he could hear the dogs barking, see the vapor of his breath in the cold air, feel the bullet every time it pierced his body. He was the first person I met who was wholly convinced that his soul had been reincarnated. Of course, I asked the usual questions, about where the new souls come from and such, because I was pretty well-programmed by my midwestern, Catholic upbringing to disregard this kind of Shirley MacLaine nonsense. He told me not to think so linearly. To consider the vastness of the universe.
Years later I told a friend about this and she brought up the concept of souls traveling through lifetimes together to sort their spiritual shenanigans out. I have enough friends into the woo-woo that I’d had some fun discussions in this vein before. All of that lingering attachment and emotional baggage across centuries: so ripe for exploration!
My friend was pretty sure we reincarnated with eleven other souls. As I chewed on the potential to explore this in a story, I thought, “Okay, but what if it’s five souls that travel together to tie-up their spiritual loose ends?” And the idea for the world in Secondhand Stardust began to take shape. One in which reincarnation could suddenly, seemingly, be authenticated, and you could – in theory – readily connect with your soulmates. What might that look like? How would it impact relationships and society? Though my lead characters’ journeys start with romantic yearning, I wanted to flip that traditional soulmate trope on its head: what if we have to also find the jerks in our past to find resolution? I also wanted to explore the pliability of memory and its impact on our identity.
The concept seemed like something that could address our hunger for connection in an increasingly lonely world. It might also be harder to rewrite history if there were people at the table who had actually been there. (As a history major, this fascinates me!) And if reincarnation was real, yet manifesting physically in less than a quarter of the population, how might unscrupulous people try to exploit it? How would unaffected people react?
So I started with that speculative world, setting it far enough in the future to tighten the resource screws and feel weirdly inevitable. The characters came next, and I hope you have as much fun getting to know them as I did.