Author Archives: Julie Sondra

Quoted: Contemporary Sexuality

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Jumping off some quotes I made to Salon earlier this year, I seem to have found myself quoted a bunch of times in AASECT’s newsletter, Contemporary Sexuality.

“Asexuality Gets More Attention, But Is It a Sexual Orientation?”

aasectI wasn’t specifically asked about having my quotes appear here, but I was represented pretty well. Sadly, the article does spend a lot of time suggesting asexuality is a trend and what danger asexual people pose to other people exploring their sexuality since, you know, it’s such a fad and it’s probably about repression. Oh well.

New Webcomic: Negative One

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I love the old Ivy stories I wrote in college—from my modern fantasy series, The House That Ivy Built—but her story just isn’t cohesive enough to survive as a marketable novel, so I think one cool thing I can do with it is make a webcomic about it.  So . . . that’s exactly what I’m doing.

This alternating-story webcomic will update every Friday for the foreseeable future.  And since it’s pretty much my own thing, you can expect a lot of sort of indulgent narration.  But if you like that sort of thing, perhaps this webcomic will be up your alley.

Completed New Short Story: “Just Like Stephen”

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Finished a new short story called “Just Like Stephen.” Genre: Modern fantasy.  Word count: About 7,000 words.

In the society in which the protagonist lives, magic is a rare but real part of life, cropping up somewhat randomly among the population. Unfortunately, admitting to having magic is a one-way ticket to a government-run institution where officials channel the magical people’s powers into controlled projects. The government basically considers having magic the same as having a sickness, and it’s true that it can cause insanity, so they claim to be helping the magical people by institutionalizing them and training them.

The protagonist’s older brother Stephen developed magic one day, and suddenly everything was different—he had to be taken away, and no one seemed to care but him. Before leaving, Stephen urges his brother to try to hide his magic if he develops it later, which they both suspect he will. And in the present, the protagonist, now nineteen, has taken his brother’s advice and has hidden his magic for four years. Unfortunately, magic has a way of deciding when it’s going to be used, and this is a story of how he answers that call without letting anyone else hear him.

I’ll be pursuing publication for this.  Eventually.

On Originality

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“There ARE no new ideas.  Everything under the sun has been done.”

Sometimes we hear this from people who are defending trite rehashings/copycat stories/ripoffs of existing, well-known, popular works.  After all, there are really only a few story types that just keep getting retold, so why should we expect originality from writers?  Why not just let them lift whatever they like and get away with calling it an homage?

Because even established story types like the Hero’s Journey can be told in original ways.  Even traditional high fantasy can be Tolkien-inspired without reading like the author thinks Middle-Earth is a public-domain playground.

Continue reading →

Wendy West Saves the World

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I thought I’d share this.  I found my first short story, written when I was eleven years old, in fifth grade: March 15, 1989. It was written in pencil in a preteen’s careful cursive. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation has been left untouched.  It’s called “Wendy West Saves the World.”

Wendy West was an explorer who had shiny black hair and light purple eyes. She could see farther than a million telescopes put together could see.

One day Wendy West was exploring a hole in Sudan, Africa. She heard some screeching inside the hole and a laser beam shot out of it, narrowly missing Wendy. It hit a tree and the tree evaporated into thin air.

Wendy was shocked at this. She looked into the deep hole. It seemed endless, so she used her special vision to peer deep into the hole. At the bottom, there was a huge group of tall, blue men! They shot lasers at her. They missed. She ran to a nearby police station.

The police were on coffee break. Wendy got a police man to come to the hole. He looked inside the hole. “Is this your idea of a joke? I don’t see anything,” Said the police man. “No,” said Wendy. She shined a flashlight down in the deep hole. Sure enough, nothing was there. She used her special vision to look around in Africa, then in Europe. When she got to China, there were the blue men, shooting huge buildings down.

The police sent helicopters to China, after Wendy West reported her story. They disposed of the aliens, and then they had a party for Wendy and proclaimed that day a holiday called “Alien day!”

Completed New Novel: Bad Fairy

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Finished writing Bad Fairy!  Took about 5 weeks, except I had to take a break when I had a houseguest.  (Hey Fred.)

Genre: Fantasy (fairy tale retelling).

Length: 41 chapters/815 pages/~255,000 words.

Tag line: “What happened before Sleeping Beauty slept?”

Keywords: FANTASY: Fairy tale retelling, medieval period fantasy, Sleeping Beauty, fairies, magic, magick, dark fantasy, reincarnation, elemental magic, identity issues, quirky narrators, epistolary, autobiography (character).

Protagonist: Delia Morningstar.

POV: First person, past tense.

About:

Delia Morningstar is a precocious and inquisitive half-fairy girl whose great talent and drive mark her for a promising future. But she has some peculiar interests: What is she learning when she dabbles in forbidden “dark” magick, and why does she have such an interest in the afterlife?

Shunned by popular society, she struggles to make her own living, but when one of her attempts to help her kingdom is misunderstood, she is held responsible for a curse on baby Aurora, her kingdom’s beloved princess. Now forced into hiding, Delia must live in disguise as a typical fairy and continue to work toward a surprising goal: Saving the princess from death. While tweaking destiny from behind her mask, Delia discovers many unexpected aspects of both herself and her enemies. Though she ultimately succeeds in her original goal, she finds that dealing with who she’s become is a battle she’s only beginning.

Next up: Lots of editing!

New Novel: Bad Fairy

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Started a new book!  The working title is Bad Fairy.

About:

Bad Fairy is the story of Delia Morningstar, a fairy whose involvement with her kingdom’s princess inspired the story of Sleeping Beauty.  Written as an autobiography of the bad fairy, it tells the tale of how Delia grew up, made her enemies, got blamed for a curse, and spent part of her life in hiding.

It’s based on a short story I wrote in 2000.  When Francesca Lia Block’s book The Rose and the Beast came out, some other fans and I wrote our own retold fairy tales to celebrate the release, and when one of my friends reviewed the short story and said it could make a great novel, I decided to find out if he was right.

 

New Novel: Joint Custody

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Started a new book!  The working title is Joint Custody.

Genre: Kids’ fiction (middle reader/realistic fiction).

Length: 5 chapters/62 pages/~18,500 words.

Status: In progress/on hold/back burner.

Tag line: “Mom’s house” or “Dad’s house.” Where’s “my house”?

Keywords: KIDS’ FICTION: Juvenile, school, divorce, family issues, animal rights.

Protagonist: Bainbridge Kavin Cassidy (“Bay”).

POV: First person, present tense.

About:

I started writing Joint Custody after a long string of reading Newbery Award-winning books that disappointed me. I heard myself saying “I could do better than THAT!” several times before it struck me that if that was the case, I should do so. Joint Custody is the result. I figured it needed to address a relevant issue for children these days, so I picked divorce. But it also needed to be unique, and if anything, Bay is unique. When I finally finish this book, I hope many kids will relate to him. This is aimed at upper elementary school kids.

This book catalogs the mental wanderings of a confused kid called Bay. It reads a bit like stream-of-consciousness, but in his roundabout way, he really is saying something and making observations. Bay’s parents split up when he was very young, and now he feels as though he has no home. He is either at “Mom’s house” or “Dad’s house.” Bay is kinda thinky for an eleven-year-old, and he shares his philosophical ponderings about roadkill, conformity, having two houses, and the mysterious girl named Marz who’s always taking his picture. First-person present-tense story about a kid who thinks a little differently and just wants to know where home is.