I’m ready to print, sign, scan, and send in my contract to get The Dark published
by Christopher Matthews Publishing! I’d have done it already except I’m
watching/playing with/cleaning up after my 1.5 year-old, which is a
full-time job. At least she sleeps 12 hours a day.
I’m incredibly excited about finally getting The Dark to a publishing company! I’ve been trying for about 10 years now! And the fact that they accepted it? I figured it was too ‘different’ to get anyone’s attention, despite all
the praise I’ve gotten for it over the years. I was actually ready to
sit down and focus on finishing Afterworld, thinking it’d be more
marketable. It still might be, to be honest, but it can wait! I still
need to get some of the incredible amount of research I’ve done for Afterworld out
of my brain and into the book. Right now it’s just a story about a boy
and a girl – an admittedly engaging story, but it’s a pale shadow of
what I want it to be.
The Dark, however, is very much done. It’s been rewritten, reimagined, and edited countless times.
The main purpose of the story’s always been there, but the execution,
supporting characters, conflicts, and setting have been tweaked and
altered many times to capture the feeling I wanted and to catch up with
my improving writing skill.
The book’s name itself refers to Malkarai Faerstathe, the main character – his pessimistic
personality, his tendency to lurk about at night and in shadows, and the
genetic mutation of his eyes. Where normal people have white sclera in
their eyes, darks have black. There are biological and genetic reasons
for the mutation, but it looks different, is impossible to hide, and in
general other people do not like it.
For a quick introduction to Malkarai and the other main character in The Dark, Satyrna, here’s a few paragraphs taken from my query for the book:
Malkarai Faerstathe is a skilled agent hunting the most dangerous criminals in
the country as a covert enforcer. At twenty-one, he has over a
hundred successful missions to his name. Capitalizing on his orphan
status and his condition as a ‘dark’ (a person with a rare genetic mutation
of the eyes often discriminated against with fear or revulsion), the
government groomed him at a young age – warping his nature until
they had an agent that fit their needs. Malkarai is secretive, intense,
passionate, and selective about who is close to him, particularly because he lost everyone he cared about at a young age.
Satyrna Hennessin, a nursing student who works at a store owned by her loving
parents, is a bright, intrepid, optimistic young woman with a passion
for helping and healing. She has an unusual fascination with and for
defending those with the dark mutation, beginning when two dark friends of hers were unfairly killed at a young age.
‘The Dark’ is an adventure about these two and their conflicting
personalities colliding, reconciling, and ultimately meshing. While
pursuing a particularly knowledgeable, evasive target, Malkarai ends up in Cavington,
politically neutral territory that is partially seceded from the greater
United States – a place where agents like him aren’t always allowed and
darks are never welcome. This only proves to be a problem
when he runs into Satyrna after apprehending a thief. Wanting to repay
him for his help, she forces her friendship on the obviously foreign
visitor to help him avoid the harsh criticism of the locals, but ends
up causing an avalanche of problems she never foresaw.
Thanks for reading!