Summary

Genre: YA Fantasy
Series: Book One of Brillica

Min is fifteen and a prisoner of her mom, who keeps her hidden away in a hand-built house with no electricity. Her only escape is a dream world of her own creation.

Min’s happy dreams turn dark when she is nearly killed in her dream world, and discovers that it’s not really a place of her imagining, but a stepping stone where worlds meet.
Though frightened by her near death, she can’t stay away. After all, she’s not about to leave her new tourist business to Brigsk, her troll partner, or forget about her flying lizard friend (who fancies himself a dragon).

If she’s going to survive this new world, and avoid getting grounded at home, she’ll need to solve the mystery of what her weird checkered cat has to do with the gate between worlds, convince Brigsk that dragon hordes are not good starting capital, and avoid getting eaten by any striped vorden along the way.

Progress

Status: Stagnant
Words: 50,743 of 60k
Chapters: ~20
Submissions: n/a
Revisions: 1st Draft; incomplete

Excerpt

Let’s just go back to the beginning…
Our house was old, really old. It felt like a tree house, nailed together by a couple of ten year olds using old scraps of wood. The entire place was made of wood. Every wall, every floor, everything. When the wind blew, it seemed to come right through the walls.

My dad built the entire place himself. He even cut and planed the wood. As you probably guessed, he’s no carpenter. He’s worked as a forest ranger for forty-two years in the Ozark Mountains, in southern Missouri. It’s an amazing place, a beautiful and wild place. That’s my dad’s real love: nature.

But I can’t blame the fact that the home creaks and groans constantly on him. It wasn’t his idea to build it. Kit—that’s my mom, remember—insisted. It had to be on this spot and it had to be built using the enormous tree that they uprooted to make the space. It was her house and it had to be perfect.

Obviously, her idea of perfect and mine don’t play together. They just pick up their toys and go home.

Which is why, on my sixteenth birthday, I was huddled under a mass of blankets, cuddling with Buniony, my stuffed, red bunny, and wishing to be anywhere but that house. The moonlight winked in and out of my window as the giant tree outside swayed in the wind. The lantern on my night stand, which was never allowed to go out at night, sputtered with each gale.

Oh, did I mention we had no electricity? No television, no internet, no telephone. I was the only kid on the planet who literally had no friends. I saw other kids once a month, when my dad took me to town. I swear Kit looked like she would cry, like we might never return, each time we drove off. I could have made friends with those kids, if I was ever allowed to sleep over at their houses or go to their parties, but Kit was unbelievably protective of me. She never wanted me out of her sight and she never wanted to be anywhere but this house.

I couldn’t even walk in the woods unless dad went with me. My room was the only place I was allowed to go without supervision, and even then, the door had to be open. And you could bet she would be standing in it from time to time to make sure I hadn’t crept out the window.

She was standing in the doorway now. She never said anything, just stood there and stared at me while I slept. I always pretended to be asleep. It was a sacred moment for her and, no matter how irritated my mom could make me, I didn’t want to ruin that: I was “her precious Min”, short for Mindy. I laid there and tried not to shiver, not feeling at all precious.

Brillica, our cat, perked up and Kit slipped away silently. Not even the cat could move in that house without the floor creaking in protest, but Kit always could. She was like a special forces elitist, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find her swinging outside my window with her face covered in shoe polish and wearing a pair of night goggles.