Something Cool in Latin . . .

. . . would be a nice title for this post. But all the Latin I know is: carpe diem, caveat emptor, and vale. That last one is thanks to Doctor Who.

This post is also egregiously overdue, and for only one reason. Shame. Well, shame and guilt. So two things. I didn't want to post until I had actually followed through on my last post. Life is busy, unpredictable, and weird right now, so it wasn't until Monday that I sat down and told myself to forget about everything else and write. And I did. Then on Tuesday, I did the same thing. For hours. But at the end of it, around 2:30 in the afternoon, I typed "THE END" in my manuscript.

Yes! I did it. I finished the first draft of the final book in my series about teenagers with superpowers. I am so glad to be done, to have these books written so I can start whipping them into shape. I need a break from that world and those characters for a bit before I begin that process, though, which brings me to my shiny new project.

I don't want to get into a whole lot of specific details because it's just kind of dumb to put the whole plot of your story on the internet before you even write it. So here's all I'm going to say:

Snow White.

Gender-swapped.

In space.

That's it. The weirdness for me, I think, will come in totally switching gears, from a series to a stand-alone, from urban fantasy to straight sci-fi, from me have to make everything up to having the bones of a plot laid out for me by retelling a fairy tale.

Snow White is not my favorite fairy tale. Rapunzel is. Why? Because everything starts with an obsession with food, and that is awesome. (I'm way into food, in case you didn't know.) Snow White is my second favorite fairy tale because I have a strong childhood attachment to it AND it has food (the apple!). Prince Caspian is my favorite Narnia book because of the food in the beginning (apples! smushed sandwiches produced from pockets!). So you see the theme here.

I've already dabbled at retelling Rapunzel (set in contemporary . . . L.A., maybe? can't remember), and maybe I'll go back to it someday. But I am really, really excited about Snow White. I fall asleep thinking about ways I can adapt certain plot points and how fantasy magic could translate into a sci-fi world and the logistics of making Snow White a boy . . . It's so much fun, it's a wonder I can fall asleep at all.

So that's what I'm up to. One book complete. On to the next one.