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novels: I began writing novels in Junior High with the inspiration of a couple friends. By college, it was a real addiction. I wrote my first work of experimental fiction, entitled Kat's Dream, freshman year during first term finals. I studied advanced fiction writing with Diana Abu-Jaber, at University of Oregon, where I wrote the short story Drowning, that eventually became the monumental four-part work, Drowning, Burning, Flying.

After four years writing D,B,F & four years editing it, I was convinced it was too long and genre-less to publish as a first novel. So in the summer of 2004, I began penning Trajectories. Six months later it was finished, and a year after that, it had been through five major overhauls. Now I just need an agent.

My next project is researching and rewriting a book I originally wrote at age 15, a jazz-era road trip that treats themes of racial justice and reincarnation.

Synopsis:
Trajectories
Drowning, Burning, Flying

Trajectories Synopsis

Overwhelmed by the amount of detail she can perceive, Tara, "the tracker," is unable to focus and form memories from her experiences. Occasionally she crosses paths with traces of someone that seems important to her. Following these traces, she lurks around the person, preferring to remain unseen until she has enough information to know why they have caught her interest. With each person she follows, she comes closer to finding what she has really lost. She begins following the dancer Atsuko when she overhears a bit of Trent's music coming from her distant apartment. After dozens of forays to Atsuko's studio, Tara realizes the woman has cancer. Aware that she is being followed, Atsuko meets Tara and introduces her to her circle of friends, including Kiél, the godfather of the musician, Trent. After meeting Kiél, Tara starts an unusual friendship with the older man, whom she abandons as soon as he introduces her to his godson after one of his concerts. Trent recognizes her immediately as a witness to the car accident that took his parents' lives. They begin a tentative relationship, thwarted by Tara's amnesia. Meanwhile, Eric, Trent's agent is mired in alcoholism and working eighty hour weeks. He spends his time pining over the disappearance of his girlfriend Skye, eighteen years before and the subsequent demise of his loveless marriage to the detective he met while looking for Skye. After finding his wife strangled on their couch ten years ago, he began his using own tracking skills to find her killer, ending up time and again in the office of the chief of police. Realizing the chief's guilt, Eric gave up tracking because he had no proof of the man's guilt. When Eric meets Tara at Trent's apartment, he recognizes her as the disappeared Skye and discovers that his own wife had destroyed Skye's file to win Eric for her own. Then Tara leads all the characters on a foray into the secrets of their past, bringing Eric to sobriety, Trent to forgiveness and true love, and untangling the dread secrets of Atsuko's elicit love for her uncle during and after the dancer's illness and death. In the end, the tracker faces her memory of causing the accident that killed Trent's parents, releasing her to develop her relationship with Eric.

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Drowning, Burning, Flying Synopsis

Drowning, follows the playfully childlike Irene through a world that runs on the simplistic physics of her misunderstandings of reality. When the ocean starts coming into her house, she complacently adapts to its presence, until the house is borne away on the waves. At last she takes refuge with her friend Eric Green, then abandons hope and climbs up and away through a trapdoor in the sky.

In Burning, we are introduced to the nymphomaniac Meta, who works as a welder by day and a sex line operator by night. Bewildered by a variety of mysterious fires that are incringing on the city where she lives, she begins to doubt her sanity when her best friend, the self-same Eric Green admits he can't see them.

As events escalate out of control, she takes refuge in a new job in violin repair, where she meets her doppelganger in an ethereal woman named Alligia, who is in love with the famous violinist, Solen. When Solen confronts her one day, accusing her of being the same person as Alligia, she runs in fear to the top of a nearby fire practice tower where she awakes to reality too late.

Flying follows the forbidden love of T'Ashen Yr, and her older mentor, Mielu, as their lives are manipulated by the mysterious, and malevolent Old Master, who insists on giving her lessons in flight. As they travel across their homeland to a meeting of the great council, they discover the secrets of T'Ashen Yr's birth and a plot to obscure their culture's impending extinction from planetary cooling.

T'Ashen Yr discovers she is chosen to be sent away to find some remedy for her people, and that no one who has been sent has ever returned. She protests, as she does not wish to leave Mielu or their young child, Elora, but both she and the child are sent.

Showing up in modern times, T'Ashen Yr, now Alligia, and her friend Alan, befriend a regular guy, Tim, who is puzzled by their behavior. Alligia is fairly insane, because she misses her daughter and Mielu. Alan, who was betrothed in youth to her daughter is searching for her. He connects Alligia with Mielu, now named Solen, and leaves to find Elora.

In the last book, The Opposite of Dreaming, Sara is an orphan who grew up in a Los Angeles ghetto and spends her college summers with her wealthy friend Alex in Maine. They start rowing out to an island with Alex's friend Donovan, where they discover a mysterious tower that appears to be haunted, and is filled with messages to someone named Elora. Sara identifies with the character Elora, but doesn't know why. When she meets a local butler named Alan, who calls her Elora, she is both frightened, and intrigued. When she returns to school, she faces the difficult memory of a boyfriend who killed himself, and gets an invitation from Tim to come North to record an album. When she arrives, she is reunited with her father, Solen, and saves her mother from a possible blaze at the top of a fire practice tower. Or does she?

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