After year of writing, editing, cover changes, submissions, suggestions from friends, interruptions due to grad school, and other obstacles, it finally exists!
I started writing this novel years ago for NaNoWriMo. It wasn’t my first attempt at NaNoWriMo, but it was the first one that I thought might turn into something readable. The basic idea was to create a ‘Spirited Away’ or ‘Alice in Wonderland’ set in Baltimore, but with a more realistic feel and autumn vibe. Initially, a young girl named Anne got lost in the city and her imagination transformed the fast food restaurants and dirty panhandlers into an fantasy adventure as she searched for her mom. This concept ended up being pretty hard, basically because it’s a crazy challenge to actually describe things from a 5 year-old’s perspective. Like, can they reach the door knob, or read, or handle locks or money or other concepts? Do they know how street signs work or how the city is laid out? Probably not.
So it evolved into a story about an 11 or 12 year old girl who wakes to find the city completely abandoned. She meets her neighbor’s cat (who seems to be able to talk, now) and leaves Mt. Vernon to explore and figure out what happened. They encounter ghosts and monsters and other creatures along the way, and end up getting lost among some of Baltimore’s more well known monuments and locations as well as meeting a few of its ignoble celebrities.
Today it’s available on Amazon for free and later it will be $2.99. Soon it will be in print as well. I’m super excited and can’t wait to finally hold a copy in my hand, which will be a super surreal feeling after all these years.