Tag: Young Adult (YA)

Flash: I Am Prophecy – Part 3

Erin Penn

She had emerged by herself and no one knew. Nineteen minutes and counting. Reaching out a hand, she touched her mirror image. Twenty-two minutes since dawn.

 

The screams normally would have activated the sensor, but her recent growth spurt inflicted violent cramps and she often woke screaming. After the fourth false alarm, her father had signed off on temporarily removing her emergency room monitor rather than pay fines. He had grown a foot in a six-month period as a teenager, and her body had already added three inches in height since the class term began in addition to her micro-boobs inflating to something she was having trouble hiding in the school uniform.

 

Wait, she had been so confused she had forgot. Too many pasts, too many futures, she had forgotten her present.

 

Throwing aside her sleeping robe, Vixen activated the uniform program. Some classmates only ran the shaver once a week, letting their fuzz give hints of individuality. Blond, brunette, white. But Vixen had always tried to blend with the crowd.

 

Standing in the center of the room, Vixen waited as the preparer removed any hair from overnight and spray painted her body with today’s skin color. Dark skin, milk chocolate brown, she sighed in relief. The flush red and dark blue lines branching with every blood vessel and vein submerged under the artificial dye. … Tomorrow, no … tomorrow’s tomorrow will be white, nearly no change for her and her friend Osantos, extra pigment for people like Marty who would have virtually no color added today. Her reprieve was temporary, but enough for now.

 

While sorting through the infinite of near-time, trying to discover a path to stay undiscovered, Vixen nearly missed the closet opening with her day’s clothes laid out. On top of the white blouse and tailored plaid slacks was a binder. She hated that binder, but the Emperor’s Boarding School took uniform to a level unknown anywhere at anytime in the history of man. – Her face relaxed into a small smile, her first since waking, as she verified this bit of unverifiable common knowledge. – Blending, being invisible in the crowd of children, was even more important than normal so she willingly plucked the stretchy fabric from the pile.

 

The binder did not snap in place after being wrapped around her rib cage.

 

“Maker bless mom’s genes.” Vixen threw the clothing back into the closet in disgust, laughing a little as mundane habit pushed back survival fear. She hit the button for a remeasure, the third one that month. Stepping completely within the closet, Vixen did the “tailor tape dance” as the kids in school nicknamed it.

 

Put your arms up, put them down, bend over, stretch arms to the side, stand up, lunge forward. An extra five minutes to throw her morning schedule off. An extra five minutes of life. But being late activated monitors, checks, which she no longer could afford. The path she needed to stay on required her recover a minute somewhere, otherwise the school would run a full diagnostic when she reported.

 

Today, she just wanted to live through today.

 

New clothes were released, the binder replaced with a brassiere and the shirt cut to accommodate her increasingly generous shape. No more hiding her gender.

 

Throwing on her clothes, she grabbed the blessed half-helm and snapped it in place over her newly non-human eyes and still human ears before rushing out for family breakfast.

 

(words 572; first published 4/10/14; republished new format 10/13/19)

Flash: I Am Prophecy – Part 2

Erin Penn

“Maker, no.” Her melodic voice restored danced upon her ears with new tones, making her sob. Between tears she begged, “I don’t want to die.”

 

And I don’t have to.

 

The future. She could see it a little. In time, she would become better. Time, she needed time. How to hide?

 

The room brightened as her morning wakeup chimed. Vixen hadn’t even noticed her room had still been in night-time mode.

 

The change had taken her at night. It never took people at night. Only adults. Only daytime. Only with others around. Only in the few days after space travel. And only on a planet. Everyone knew that. Which was why people either traveled all the time, like her father on his judge’s circuit, remaining in space for years on end. Or stayed put after immigrating to a new world. No one wanted to become an Unnatural.

 

Because mankind had decided they did not want Unnaturals around. The first one had tried to overthrow the empire, the second destroy it. Billions died. After that, every planet had a cleansing team to be activated the minute an emergence was detected. Located near the space port, since nearly all changes happened around that hub, after all space travel was a key trigger, the teams usually completed a cleansing within an hour of report. Which was important, as Unnatural grew more powerful every minute of existence.

 

She had emerged by herself and no one knew. Nineteen minutes and counting. Reaching out a hand, she touched her mirror image. Twenty-two minutes since dawn.

 

(Words 259; first published 4/5/2014; republished new blog format 10/6/2019) 

Flash: I Am Prophecy – Part 1

Erin Penn

Tell Them I Am is Here Part One: I Am Prophecy

I am prophecy.

The words drifted into her head, Vixen’s first thought upon waking. She stretched and rolled over. A teenager, waking was the roughest part of her day. Dozens of thoughts danced in and out of her head. A melancholy breakfast with her mom, answers she studied for her Space Settlement History test, a battle in Trade Landing, new music from her favorite Taurusian band, the end of the Universe, befriending the next Emperor of Man. Some thoughts gray and misty, not likely to happen. Some nearly clear, like a memory from yesterday. A few confusing, emotions she had not been exposed to. Friendship with Osantos going in directions her body nearly understood, but felt uncomfortable. The kissing part … she tried to chase down the thought before the next group of words sliced through her mind, shattering her peace.

I am history.

Mankind, war and wonder, the first self-aware thought of an ape, the first killing in anger, looking down on the tiny cradle planet, the thousand ships leaping to the far reaches. Hate, pain, love, joy, reason, insanity, tears, laughter … each hit her, stabbed her. No misty thoughts, but real, fixed, unchangeable situations. Victory, horror … More than her young mind could handle. Pushing her further and further until something in her twisted. Snapped. Awoke.

I am now.

A final scream tore from Vixen as she threw her blankets back and sat up. She had been screaming for some time.

“No, …no,” her ruined voice pleaded as she jumped off the mattress and ran to the mirror.

The reflection showed black eyes, pupils expanding to swallow green irises then the surrounding white. Streaks of color, light, danced back and forth between her slightly slanted eyes as they became a deeper dark than night. Veins went from a mild green to deep blue as her body optimized oxygen usage creating a stark red and blue map vivid against her cream and peaches complexion. Vixen’s hyperventilation quickly dropped to a rate not found among homo sapiens.

“Maker, no.” Her melodic voice restored danced upon her ears with new tones, making her sob. Between tears she begged, “I don’t want to die.”

(words 363, first published 4/4/14; republished new blog format 9/1/19)

Book Review: This May Go On Your Permanent Record

Erin Penn

Original & New Book Covers from Amazon

This May Go On Your Permanent Record by Kelly Swails

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON

Sally Clark is curious about how technology works, which would be fine except her experiments tend to be illegal. She’s also a terrible liar, which lands her in court for stealing groceries with nothing but a hacked smart phone. While the judge isn’t impressed that her alcoholic mother had traded the grocery money for booze, she is intrigued by her hacking skills. Given a choice between juvenile detention and something called The School for Extraordinary Youth, she rolls the dice and chooses the latter. She’s barely unpacked her bags when she discovers that SEY is a prep school for world domination.

 

MY REVIEW

A quick, but full read, which took me about five hours one night, this Young Adult (YA) story follows a fourteen-year-old girl from August to October of her freshman year in high school. Wow that sounds boring, but this book is anything but.

I picked it up thinking it sounded a lot like a superhero academy story, “a school for world domination” is the tag line, and it reads like one too. Only instead of superpowers, the students are all children of world leaders except for a few potentials brought in to shake things up. Sally comes from trailer trash but determined to rise above it – or at least stay out of juvie where the judge says she will go if she flunks out of this school. Thrust into the world of movers and shakers, she proves to be a true shaker. The class president goes after her with blood in her eye; maybe the daughter of leaders should have blinked first to clear the eye so she could see Sally clearly because this girl doesn’t back down from nobody. The two duke it out for class domination in a school teaching them how to take over the world and giving them the tools to do it.

The story follows the present YA formula of two love interests – one helpful and like a buddy – and the other intriguing, strong, and handsome, but not a close friend yet. She doesn’t go for either in this book but knows she has a crush on one and gets flashes of interest in the other.

We don’t see much personal growth of the character in this book as it more concentrates on setting up the world and defining the characters. Plus the overall story arc with the class president. Lots of little things happening keeping the story moving – I didn’t have any interest in taking a break while I read it. 

I do enjoy all the name dropping – the leadership of the school also comes from old, powerful families. If you like history, this book makes you want to break out a “who’s who” to see what Easter eggs the author is writing in the series – names like Custard, Curie, and Bush tease the reader.

This manuscript is a very nice read. Plus I think the series will rock – for example book two, now that we know everyone and the world, should blow this one out of the water. The writing is tight and I expect Ms. Swails to only improve in the future.

Author Spotlight: AJ Hartley

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover

My publisher is ecstatic – we picked up A.J. Hartley for a short series his Big Press didn’t want to keep the rights to because it couldn’t sell the 100,000 copies they need to make money. Mr. Hartness became friends with the NY-times best-selling author on the convention circuit (remember writers, networking is a thing) and when Dr. Hartley mention a pet project of his that was available, John threw himself on that grenade to keep the Shakespearean professor from trunking his Will Hawthorne stories.

For his day job, A.J. Hartley is the Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at UNC Charlotte. Which means he doesn’t just like literature, he breathes it.  Working with David Hewson, he recreated prose versions Macbeth and Hamlet. 

Well and truly bitten by the writing bug, he puts pen to paper for a variety of genres: thriller, fantasy, the previous mentioned historical fiction, and even some middle grade and young adult. He goes as far as to write additional works under a pseudonym of Andrew Hart. But nearly everything he does, including his literary non-fiction professor publications, are doen under A.J. Hartley.

His Steeplejack series is the “new thing” and worth a read, as is nearly everything this master of the English language produces.