A few months before my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I woke up from a very strange dream. I dreamed that I died and was given a new body-- that of a pregnant woman. It’s pretty easy to see where this dream came from. I never gave my mother the chance to be a grandma, and there are times when the lost years eat at me. She would have embraced her role with delight and love, sharing her passions for books and art and baking. But it’s too late. I’m too old. She died late last spring.
But the dream stuck with me. Crazy thoughts would spring to mind. Like, who was the child? Who was the mother? How could this happen? And why? I wrote a scene about it, and I shared that scene with two people: my best friend and my sister-in-law. It made them cry. This scene was the foundation for an entire novel, which I finally finished this year, a year after Mom’s death.
The novel is fantasy, complete with demons and angels and telepathic dogs. I wrote it to answer my questions about the dream, and to let me use a story to fix some of the choices I made in life. Of course, that would be a pretty one-dimensional story, so I pulled in the other parts of my life that give me so much angst. Namely, the climate crisis we are in, and the politics of America. There are other themes that found their way into the book, bubbling up from somewhere in my psyche.
I’m proud of the result. I’m even hoping to publish it someday. Advice from the writing world is to create a social presence to attract followers and create a market for my works. (Plural because there’s more to this story than one book.) And so I’m starting this blog. I’ll use the blog to explore the world I created, the places, the characters, the themes, the research behind key aspects of the story, and anything else I come up with. But I won’t give you the actual book-- you’ll have to buy it. Someday.
The title may change, but for now I call it Guardians of Grace, written under a pen name: N.L. Baber. Here’s the current version of the pitch:
Annie, a warm-hearted and pragmatic octogenarian, has one regret—she never had children. When she is offered a second life, raising a child destined to save a dying Earth, she can’t resist. She didn’t expect to find herself in somebody else’s pregnant body, running from a wealthy demon and his dragon consort who want the child dead.
When Annie realizes the danger she’s gotten herself into, her life skills seem a bit inadequate to protect her child. Other than stabbing the demon with knitting needles or distracting him with banana bread, hiding seems to be her only option. Annie’s coping abilities are further tested when her daughter Grace develops amazing powers of her own—courtesy of ancestral spirits and archangels who insist on popping in unannounced.
As the demon accelerates his efforts to destroy the Earth with climate chaos, Annie realizes she cannot simply hide her daughter forever, even with the help of new and old friends. She must help Grace embrace her destiny and save the world—after she figures out what exactly that destiny entails.
Please follow this blog and explore the world of Guardians of Grace with me.
