The cover of Sacrifice of Seven has the words Across This Spiral Galaxy: Book One. I’ve been working on a book series since 2020 – on Instagram and on Airtable (my very useful organizational tool, recommended to me a while ago by Arielle Bailey), as well as in my sprawling word.doc trail, it’s been called many things. Fairy tale retellings, fairy tale retellings on the moon, fairy tale retellings in space, fairy moon series…but as I kept working on ideas, each name made less sense.
All the stories started on the moon, with a Sleeping Beauty retelling and a Little Mermaid retelling. But then I ended up with a Phantom of the Opera retelling and a gender-swapped Cupid/Psych retelling, with the latter set on earth. Then Little Mermaid got combined with some Batfamily inspiration, and a Medusa/Rapunzel combination came into being. A Tam Lin story was inspired by the last 3 Star Wars movies and set in distant space…and then I ended up with a Red Riding Hood/Red Hood-inspired story set on Mars. My Cupid/Psych story started using some Finnish mythology and I got the idea for a gender-swapped Snow White/Magnificent Seven space-western.
Basically, everything went from fairy tale retelling set on the moon…to fairy-tale inspired stories set in space. A significant portion of them (The Medusa Maze, for one; The Things They Cannot See (Cupid/Psyche) for another) ended up dealing with human experimentation and manipulation…and the mirroring across nature has always fascinated me.
Since we live in a spiral galaxy and I spent a lot of time learning about DNA, a spiral a little closer to home (go here to see a perfect illustration), the new series title pulled it all together.
Also: a note on the Book One.
Sacrifice of Seven is a novella, and one set on a different planet and at a different time period from any of my other stories so far planned. There is certainly significant world-building continuity there, and things that are hinted at in this story will be far more explored in other stories. But this is Book One because it is the first one published & while it currently takes place first chronologically…Book Two will not be a sequel.
What will Book Two be? Check out my next blog post for more details. 🙂
