A paid journalist since age 14, I’ve covered
engineering, veterinary medicine and aviation in-depth.

With my first young-adult hopepunk novel, Under a Starless Sky, I want to use that science-writing expertise and merge it with my dream of writing fiction.

In the world of Under a Starless Sky, genetically modified children (GenMods) are preferred to natural-born kids (Nats). This makes 15-year-old Deklan a spectacular disappointment to her father Abram, the authoritarian one-world government’s Minister of Science and Technology. Abram largely ignores Deklan in favor of Deklan’s GenMod younger sister Anaya, until Anaya is killed in a rebel anti-government attack intended for Abram.

Finding himself without his preferred child, and with an increasingly unmanageable spouse, Abram disappears into his government job. Abram claims he must do the regime’s bidding, but his true objective is his own rogue mission of cloning his dead daughter, along with modified and edited versions of himself and his wife, leaving Deklan out of his secret new “ideal family” altogether.

Realizing her mother and sister’s lives are at stake when she discovers a closet full of clones resembling the Mensa family (minus Deklan), Deklan enlists two science-experiment rejects she meets along the way to help her. Deklan’s new found family — a hybrid frog-human who makes Deklan laugh again, and a hybrid octopus-girl who shows Deklan she was never second best and her imperfections make her lovable — help Deklan challenge her father, who has become unhinged.