So, I finished the first draft of JUJU’S Child (74,000 words), which is fantastic since for the last week, I've been fighting off some sort of ICK. I’d pulled on my big girl pants and had the flu shot back in October even though needles make me queasy, so I refuse to say that I’ve been down with the flu. That would negate the whole braving the flu shot thing. Regardless, of what I caught, it sucked me into a weird fever dream in which I was a cross between Laura Croft and Indiana Jones. Pretty cool dream—find the mystery artifact (which I never found) and kick the butts of the evil bad guys (which I kicked hard). I woke up in a pool of sweat since my fever broke and thought, whoa, didn’t I write something like this once.
I began PSYCHIC JOURNEY (silly title, so says the hubby) after graduating from college with a BA in Anthropology. I had also just gotten married, so I put grad school on hold to get some real world experience in my field of choice. For about a month, I worked for a Consulting Archeologist as he excavated a site in the Folsom, CA hills. The site was composed of prehistoric Native American artifacts: arrow heads, basalt and chert flakes, bedrock mortars, burned animal bones. The historic portion of the site was a ranch-building complex built in the 1850’s and destroyed by fire.
The rolling hills looked glorious in the spring. The wildflowers bloomed. Rattlesnakes basked on blue-green rocks. The dig site had been surrounded by a wire fence to keep out the roaming cows and horses, but the babies would stand by the fence and watch us as we worked. The place tapped into a part of my soul that believed in magic and my creativity flowed.
So did my nose. I have really bad allergies and I felt much like I did this weekend. Miserable. My dream job and I couldn’t enjoy it. Allergies stamped out my dream of being an Archeologist and once I finally gave in and accepted the fact that I would be a much happier, snot-free person if I worked indoors, I began working on a way to capture the feeling of being on a dig, particularly that dig.
Psychic Journey is the story of a Jurnee Fontaine, Consulting Archeologist who finds a rare artifact during her dig in the Folsom Hills. She accidently taps into the lines of magic traveling through the site and is transported back in time to 1868. With her knowledge of the future destruction and death of the inhabitants of the ranch in the same year that she finds herself in, Jurnee must somehow alter the course of history, or lose those she has come to love.
I loved this story when I started writing it. I love it now fifteen years later. The problem is that it is already 104,000 words and I never completed it. But, that darn fever gave me an idea. An idea that keeps wiggling in my brain and growing bigger….I have a new project to work on while Juju’s Child is being edited by the critique partners. YAY!!! I’ll keep you posted.
I began PSYCHIC JOURNEY (silly title, so says the hubby) after graduating from college with a BA in Anthropology. I had also just gotten married, so I put grad school on hold to get some real world experience in my field of choice. For about a month, I worked for a Consulting Archeologist as he excavated a site in the Folsom, CA hills. The site was composed of prehistoric Native American artifacts: arrow heads, basalt and chert flakes, bedrock mortars, burned animal bones. The historic portion of the site was a ranch-building complex built in the 1850’s and destroyed by fire.
The rolling hills looked glorious in the spring. The wildflowers bloomed. Rattlesnakes basked on blue-green rocks. The dig site had been surrounded by a wire fence to keep out the roaming cows and horses, but the babies would stand by the fence and watch us as we worked. The place tapped into a part of my soul that believed in magic and my creativity flowed.
So did my nose. I have really bad allergies and I felt much like I did this weekend. Miserable. My dream job and I couldn’t enjoy it. Allergies stamped out my dream of being an Archeologist and once I finally gave in and accepted the fact that I would be a much happier, snot-free person if I worked indoors, I began working on a way to capture the feeling of being on a dig, particularly that dig.
Psychic Journey is the story of a Jurnee Fontaine, Consulting Archeologist who finds a rare artifact during her dig in the Folsom Hills. She accidently taps into the lines of magic traveling through the site and is transported back in time to 1868. With her knowledge of the future destruction and death of the inhabitants of the ranch in the same year that she finds herself in, Jurnee must somehow alter the course of history, or lose those she has come to love.
I loved this story when I started writing it. I love it now fifteen years later. The problem is that it is already 104,000 words and I never completed it. But, that darn fever gave me an idea. An idea that keeps wiggling in my brain and growing bigger….I have a new project to work on while Juju’s Child is being edited by the critique partners. YAY!!! I’ll keep you posted.
