Creative Writing
Blood Pheasant
(Nove in progress.)
Synopsis:
Blood Pheasant is a 100,000-word dual-timeline literary mystery set in California and England. This work is reminiscent of Ian McEwan's Atonement as it explores how lies wreak havoc on families and Kate Morton's The Clockmaker's Daughter with its interlocking mysteries weaving through timelines.
Ornithology professor HARRIET THORNE finds herself embroiled in the crimes of her illustrious late great-grandfather COLONEL WILLOUGHBY, a British natural scientist. As she grapples with his shadowy past, she navigates a treacherous present that threatens to dismantle everything she’s worked for.
Jeopardizing the success of her avian museum proposal at a Smithsonian gala, rumors swirl about her famous forbear’s alleged involvement in his wife's murder and the mysterious theft of Darwin’s finch specimen. Hoping to disprove the allegations to save the museum funding, she travels to England with her blind mentor BRUNO. After sleuthing through the backrooms of the British Museum and finding evidence of her great-grandfather’s fraud, she discovers hidden tunnels beneath her family's Cornish manor. There, she discovers letters revealing her shocking lineage, love letters to Tzar Nicholas’s niece, and MI5 documents exposing Rasputin’s true assassin. As she zeros in on the identity of her great-grandmother’s murderer, her malevolent uncle tries to kill her for a blood pheasant stuffed with Romanov jewels. With everything at stake, Harriet's moral test becomes clear: Will she reveal her hero’s crimes to potential donors and sacrifice her ambitions, or tell the truth, breaking from her family's pattern of deceit?
Beneath the surface, Blood Pheasant explores the interplay between aspiration and the relentless pursuit of success, even when it means surrendering the truth. In BLood Pheasant, these themes are not only a vehicle for suspense and intrigue through a family saga but also an examination of the human condition. Through Harriet's and her great-grandfather's journeys, readers are invited to reflect on the fine line between drive and obsession, between ambition and the erosion of empathy.
The Lies of Bracken Hollow
Runner-Up in Vocal Media’s Next Great American Novel Challenge
“Sexpot,” Alice whispered, raising her blond eyebrows. The half-sisters took their places on a braided rug that smelled faintly of cat pee. But Harriet wasn’t trying to be a sexpot. What was a sexpot anyway? Was it someone who tried to be like Madonna or Cindi Lauper? The Bracken Hollow Elysians would have none of that kind of music. Harriet had to listen secretly on her Walkman in the small room she shared with Alice while her mother listened to Bulgarian choral music in the kitchen.
After Alice struck the tuning fork on the edge of an armchair, the girls opened their throats and began to sing Morning Has Broken to the gathering in the Wilsons’ cramped living room. Harriet could smell something buttery and sweet baking in the kitchen down the narrow hall. But it smelled more like carob than chocolate. She missed real chocolate like before they joined the Elysians. Her stomach chirped with hunger as she stared at the families seated in the fold-out metal chairs the boys had brought up from the basement.
Harriet wore the polyester zebra-print garment she had found in the rummage shack earlier that day. Alice said it was called a negligee, a term Harriet new to Harriet. She’d found it buried under a box of damp t-shirts and pilly toddler coats, the whole bundle reeking of mildew. The negligee was anything but Alysian.
But how had it gotten there, she had wondered? Such garments were too tempting and potentially sinful to be lurking in a Bracken Hollow dresser drawer. Was it too much for the performance? She wasn’t sure at the time. But fairly bold and fearless still, she swooped on it like a seagull to a dropped ice cream cone. And when she tried it on— oh, it felt delicious. She had never worn anything like it. A famous singer might wear this on stage, she thought.
But here, before the rows of constrained faces, she felt silly and naked. Through the window, the mid-day light illuminated her long, pale legs as she sang.
Horsehair on Heartstrings
A young musician explores dissonance and resolution with a fiddler, two dogs, and a glass of merlot.
Greta waited anxiously for the fiddler as she slogged through her supertonic and subdominant seventh-chord homework. “In the Bach, the alto leaps to A on the second beat,” she read aloud from her textbook. “The sole purpose of leaping at this point is to prepare the suspension." Scanning the facing page with a sour grimace, she continued reading. "Keeping the E through the second beat would produce an irregular leap into the dissonance.”