Lost Stars: A History
I feel that Lost Stars deserved its own tab, because it is my origin story. This book began when I was only 8 years old, and it filled 145 lined notebook pages, before I understood what paragraph breaks were for.
The sacred texts^
I also credit Lost Stars with kicking off my art hobby as well.
Lost Stars was originally called “CTS”, because it makes perfect sense to an 8-year-old that “CATS” with the A removed makes a great title for your sci-fi novel. The plot of this sci-fi novel was basically:
Five girls do a chemistry experiment and a chemical turns them into cat people. It also makes them SUPER SMART, so they find a fortress in the woods and build a huge spaceship, that they then fly to the moon. There they find Hune, an evil dog man who just hates them because they’re… cat people? It’s never entirely clear. On the moon, they meet a vampire cheetah. They also meet Holo, Hune’s brother. Holo has the ability to run at the speed of light. This ability never factors into the plot. Shannehh (the old spelling of Shannah’s name) then finds her brother, Kyro– she was an alien all along! WHACK!
Anyway, they go to Russia in a submarine they’ve built to get some rubies, go back in time to the medieval ages, build a catapult, come back to the present, and then end up in a laser gun battle in a black hole (which at 8, I assumed was a planet you could land on?) There is no plot, really. They just run around and defeat evil with the power of friendship.
Also, Holo got in trouble with the police for skateboarding on public property, and Kim finds him SUPER HOT.
This is extraordinarily amusing to me now, because these days, Holo is a no-nonsense general who has very little sense of humor and finds these teenage girls irritating at best.
Anyway, here’s the progression of these characters in 2000, 2009, and 2015, respectively:
The Story at Present
This story underwent about five different drafts over the course of about 10 years, and it still doesn’t have a draft any more recent than 2009. However, the story is still in the back of my brain, and it has undergone a complete transformation. There are some characters who remain: the five girls, Hune, Holo, and Shannah’s brother, Kyro. The vampire cheetah is gone, replaced by the humorless hunk Dired (who is NOT a vampire, sadly). It’s still a sci-fi, and, perhaps, still about the power of friendship. I did make an effort to diversify the cast at least.
The one great thing about having to re-do a sci-fi you thought up at the age of eight is that it forces you to get really creative. You’ve gotta drop elements that will never work (time-traveling adventures included), and search for ways to make sense of the elements you want to keep (five teenage girls being forced into space and one learning that she’s actually an alien). Also, thinking about a story for 20 years gives you time to really build out the world, to the point that I know the minutae of Shorackan politics more than I know the minutae of Earth’s.
All that said, here is the current book summary:
High school is hard enough. Getting kidnapped, waking up with a new face in a strange lab, and escaping said lab with four friends from school is even worse. Soon enough Shannah and company begins to realize that the location where they’ve been transported defines “remote”— as in, it’s on a different planet entirely. In a different solar system. In a different galaxy. Here Shannah was worried about her upcoming calculus test.
After boarding a train with stolen funds, Shannah and friends find themselves in a new city with the ability to speak a language they never learned. As they try to navigate their way with all of the survival skills their suburban upbringing has taught them, Shannah meets Holo, an eight-foot tall alien with too many teeth and control over an entire planet’s army. For some reason he’s invested in keeping her and her friends alive with the help of the stoic Dired, Holo’s assistant and winner of this year’s Miss Congeniality award (not).
On top of all this, someone wants Shannah killed about as much as several other people want her alive. As she dives deeper into the volatile politics of two opposing planets, she begins to see the web of connections— Dired, Holo, and a revolution about to explode.
There’s a very old draft on Fictionpress.
Artwork:
Wanda Walker 