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

With my first young-adult, sci-fi thriller novel, Starlight Everlasting, I want to use that science-writing expertise and merge it with my dream of writing fiction.

In STARLIGHT EVERLASTING, 15-year-old Deklan Mensa is haunted by her lasts. Especially her last goodbye to her little sister and best friend Anaya.

On a planet that’s been at war for 25 years, there have been lots of civilian casualties like Deklan’s sister Anaya, which have been neither civil nor casual to their families. The death of Anaya caused Deklan’s father to leave and Deklan’s mom to have a mental break, leaving Deklan isolated and struggling with losing everyone she loves in one way or the other.

But it’s finally the end of the war, and the One World Federation, a “benevolent dictatorship,” has taken over the planet. Deklan’s mom, long ago a Rebel Leader who opposed the Federation, is one of the few survivors who still knows what this takeover really means and strikes a deal with Deklan’s estranged father, who now works for the Federation’s Genetics Program, a trade of her life for Deklan’s life, that will at least give Deklan a fighting chance.

Now, completely alone, Deklan narrowly escapes the Federation’s genocide to hide in a secret district, The Sixth, where she finds a world of human-animal hybrid experiments, and among them two friends – a hybrid frog-human and a hybrid octopus-girl who show Deklan she can get close to people again.

The trio infiltrate the One World Federation to seek Deklan’s father, their only tie to the government that’s steamrolling the globe. They uncover Deklan’s father Abram is using all his science and governmental power to start over. Start everything over. Abram’s cloned himself, Anaya and Deklan’s mother and deleted any memory of Deklan from the clones. They uncover Deklan was never Abram’s daughter at all, but the daughter of her mom’s first and only true love, her Rebel Co-Leader, which Abram has always been hurt by. Abram has also enacted a plan that will plunge earth into a century-long volcanic winter.

Abram’s Doomsday plan is tempered by Deklan sacrificing her life, finally getting, in her opinion, a last goodbye that is right. Deklan proves there’s still potential for balance and hope on the planet, where it seems humans have gone too far meddling with nature.

In the vein of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Deklan’s superpower is her natural-born human perception and empathy, and she must use it to combat a government-science-experiment conspiracy like Justin Cronin’s The Passage.