After I finished Sync Chrome City — actually wrote a novel with a beginning, middle, and end — I set it aside. Your first novel isn’t supposed to be good.

So, I began writing my second novel and now, with a solid writing habit, I applied for a Master of Fine Arts program.

I wrote Mirror Island, my second novel, while I was working full time and obtaining my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in a low residency program. Do you need an MFA to write? Not at all, but I so admired artists and noted how many of them that I did admire had those letters after their name. 

I was in love with the whole idea of pursuing this degree and enamored of being part of that group of writers.

Goddard College at Port Townsend was a magical place, too. I went there for residencies and ran and wrote on the beach by the lighthouse. I loved being around all of the writers.

What I loved most about the program: reading. More than anything, the writers who taught the classes expanded my reading list. 

Victoria Nelson wrote and introduced me to more and more imaginative writers who expanded what was possible.

In Mirror Island, I remained committed to writing optimistic science fiction. For this novel, I read physics books and book about the latest advancements in teleportation research. I also remained tied to my theme that the catalyst for positive changes comes not from without but from within. 

Mirror Island was set adjacent to the utopia I created in Sync Chrome City. That novel featured a far future Pacific Northwest, Cascadia that had broken away from the United Government to form its own utopian enclave, New West.

Mirror Island focused on a similar enclave nearby but inland held in place by strict rules and an overbearing personality Rock Traynter, who held C-town static in a tight unchanging grip.

In Sync Chrome City, my protagonist Geneva Teresa Weltraum, who is just trying to pass her finals, discovers psychic abilities that allow her to transform matter when she connects to her group of college friends.

In Mirror Island, this theme goes a step further. Doreena Flora Moriena is actually an alien being held in place by others’ thoughts. She discovers her true transformative nature, when she begins to visit a magical island.

Since I was working and working on my MFA, a level of stress that nearly broke me, I loved that I chose to write about sexy, beautiful, island magic for my thesis. Because my imagination was being stoked in the hot fuels of writers like Bruno Schulz, Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Cavendish, Leonora Carrington, Marge Piercy, and Naomi Mitchison; it got a bit weird.

Learn more about Mirror Island and buy the book.