My mom grew up on an estate tucked into the Main Line, uber-wealthy suburbs of Philadelphia once belonging to the Delaware Indians. By the early 20^th century these towns, stitched together by The Pennsylvania Railroad, were filled with elite estates, each one hundreds of acres. And this is where my Nanny and Pop-pop, young immigrants from the Abruzzi region of Italy, settled in to have their family.

Poppy was the estate’s ‘gardener’—not to be confused with the driver, butler, groomsmen, carriage master, or any of the other dozens of help—but he was clearly much more, something closer to landscape architect. A few surviving pictures show careful planning of a formal Italian garden, hundreds of trees trimmed into topiary shapes and a full, lush vegetable garden whose bounty would rival any modern farm-to-table and which supported the entire estate’s needs.

As the gardener’s kids, my mother and her sisters enjoyed a gorgeous home near the stables, playtime with the many horses, dogs, and cats and, in my mother’s case, all the elite finery showered on the young ladies in the Main House.

My mother was confident, happy, and the perfect playmate to the middle and younger sisters in the Main House who were close to her in age, daughters of a millionaire tycoon and his elegant wife. While her tomboy middle sister played outside, and her youngest baby sister toddled close to Nanny, Maria spent her days at the Main House with the girls, playing dress up with bespoke clothing worn once to balls, enjoying private French lessons and, when the season rolled in, making trips to NYC for new coats, hats, gloves, dresses, and shoes from the finest department stores.

And she loved every minute of it.

My mother vividly recalls the time they got in great trouble from one of the maids for poking the resident alligator with a stick.

In winter, she and the girls enjoyed sleigh rides to school, the jingle of the horse’s harness echoing sharply in the crisp air, hands and feet tucked into warm folds of fur. In summer, she and the girls stayed cool in their “playhouse,” a sumptuously decorated home, complete with furniture and original artwork, built for them on the back acreage near…the petting zoo. Yes, they had their own petting zoo. My mother vividly recalls the time they got in great trouble from one of the maids for poking the resident alligator with a stick.

“Why were you poking it with a stick?” I asked her once, after I was done being amazed at the concept of a backyard zoo. And a playhouse actually larger than the single family home my mother, Nanny, and I shared in the 80s.

“Because that pond had safety bars on it and we couldn’t get any closer to touch it. The other ponds were more open.”

“Safety bars? Other ponds?”

“Of course,” she said, with a how-do-you-not-understand-common-sense look, “the alligators had to stay put. And the swans and koi couldn’t be in the same pond with the alligators so they needed their own pond.” Oh. Silly me.

Once, in grade school, she asked Nanny why some kids in school had cardboard on their feet instead of shoes. This was the mid-1930s. That conversation engendered a long night—a long lifetime—of gratitude.

Given the mountains of sadness and loss that pervaded my own childhood, delighting in my mother’s feels almost…perverse. I know better than to compare my old sorrow with my mother’s bejeweled fairy tale experience. Life can shift dramatically in a second, of course it will shift over a generation. So, I don’t go there. I simply repeat her stories for posterity, reveling in the vicarious luxury and elegance, because I love them. And her. Understanding that we all have our own paths to trek. And knowing that mine rests inside my stories.

My mom was amazing and beautiful, flawed and broken. And I think we can all agree that neither she nor her little friends should have been agitating that alligator…

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Maybe you remember your granny wearing Shalimar, the perfume: sweet, musky, very la-di-da. That’s not the what I’m talking about here. My Shalimar exists in the air, a fantastical city inhabited by, well, I’m rushing ahead. Let me start at the beginning. Some days are tougher than others. We all have those days. And when they pop up and threaten to ruin your week (or month), you stop working on your book, look to see who’s buying what genre at whatever magazine or literary journal, and go write that instead. This is the most productive procrastination. Ever. Because you can justify it, and maybe make a buck or two as well.

I saw a call for sea-inspired fantasy stories (ooooohhhh!) and so I thought righto, yeah, can do. Except, um, I don’t really write fantasy. I skate it, walk along the finest lines, look at it a lot, and even write about angels (which you’d think would qualify me, at least a little) but straight-up fantasy has never been my thing. Probably for the same reasons I only like certain kinds of humor: I’m very very very serious and overly rooted in reality. (And also sometimes humorless, but that’s for another day.)

But I liked the project and I needed a break so I fell into this idea that I would write a fantastic pirate story (YAR!) about a stowaway (meep!) but, hold on, the stowaway…needed to be a girl. Yes! An unappreciated, undervalued runaway girl whose powers nobody could even fathom. Ok, that works, but what about the rest? I knew I wanted strong women, a kitten (no pirate story is complete without requisite meow-meow), and a cool, weird, oooh how about a watery blue main character.

Since it was a pirate story, I figured I needed a ship—check—some mates to hoist sails and do piratey things—yes, check check—and a storyline about…unrequited love. Wait, what? Well, why not? I don’t love love stories. At all. Which is why you might notice that most of my characters in any of my writing don’t dance much to that song. But just this once, I thought it might be ok, so a romance between a die seejungfrau, a man made entirely of water, and his lost love was born. Ta-DA!

You know, instead of my blabbing, just read it for yourself…

“Shalimar” (from Goddesses of the Sea Anthology)

Phen lets out the topsail, ducking in time to avoid the boom that swings dangerously through the humid, dusky air.

“Get up to the nest, boy, and tell me what you see!” Phen jumps at Captain Raulo’s command. She’d watched men linger and shuffle when given an order and had seen the consequences. In fact, the wool cap pulled down on her greasy blond curls had once belonged to such a malingerer. Hustling up to the nest, sliding her hands along the greasy mast, Phen reaches the top and looks around with dread in her heart.

“Nothing, Cap’n.”

Raulo squints upwards into the dusky glare. “Report again!”

“Uh…nothing, Cap’n!” Phen shouts, barely hiding the shake in her voice. She might get thrown in the hold two stories down, deep in the boat’s foul belly, for reporting nothing. It had happened before. She hated reporting from the crow’s nest, but Raulo always sent her. A small, wiry – and unbeknownst to any of the squat, drunken men below – lithe girl, Phen could shimmy up the mainmast faster than any of them.

Phen sighs. Dark mountains raise their woolly peaks in the distance, while forested land cuts dark streaks against the horizon. Always at dusk, and always the same. Forty days at sea, and nothing. Oh, there was plenty of land in the sights, but Raulo wasn’t interested in that. Phen had overheard the crew in their hammocks one night as she squatted over the side, fitting in by pretending to do her business.

“The fairy hold on old Raulo’s heart won’t break,” Bald Jonny had said, rubbing a dented coin against a blackened tooth stub. “But he makes good when we land.”

“Not a single storm since I sailed with Cap’n Raulo, except when he gets that mist in the eyes,” added Slice, a stooped man with one eye and huge fists like sides of smoked meat. And no one had dared respond as Raulo, smooth as silk, slid onto deck to make his rounds. The crew of The Celeste, Phen had quickly found, made up some of the greatest wealth on the seas, due in large part to Captain Raulo’s uncanny ability to stop a storm in its tracks and send waves barreling away into the paths of other ships.

The next day, Raulo had pulled The Celeste 164 degrees to port. The men grumbled quietly and watched in misery as the ship sailed alongside but never stopped at the docks of Bedrock, away from the easy money to be made from whiskey and hand-milled flour in the hold. Away from the famous green-eyed beauties who danced with even the lowliest sailor for half a sovereign. But they understood Raulo’s desperation. He wanted Finlay.

That had been forty days ago, at least, by Phen’s count. Stormless though the sea was with Raulo as captain, Phen felt restless. Reaching up to scratch her dirty curls, she wonders. Maybe it was the way Raulo walked the deck, slick as ice, never pitching or rolling with the rest of the crew. Or the way his face turned the deepest shade of black-blue when infuriated. Phen wasn’t sure it mattered. She only knew that the day she had boarded The Celeste, running down the docks looking for safe passage away from her father’s debt and the filthy prison cell that waited for her, Raulo had saved her.

Continue reading Phen’s story in Goddesses of the Sea from Amazon!

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Cape May is a tiny coastal town that sits on the lip of the Delaware Bay, at the southernmost point of New Jersey where the ocean swings one way and the bay rushes the other. Growing up I was a typical Philadelphia ‘shoobie’ (someone who goes down the shore for the day) who spent my childhood much more North, in Atlantic City. They were pre-casino days, so no high rises and resorts then, just acres of hot, sunbaked beach and a long, touristy boardwalk full of junk food.

Fast forward to high school when a friend took a bunch of us down to Cape May. I fell—completely, totally, head-rushy and all—in love with the little Victorian town that juts out the bottom of New Jersey like a prissy pinky finger. Quiet. Historical. A working lighthouse. Quaint shops. Not even a boardwalk. Lots of houses with gingerbread trim in fun colors. That’s really it. Well, except for the ghosts—OMG the ghosts—but that’s for another post…  

So, when Veruca (from The Mermaid’s Spyglass) and Starling (from “Starling’s Flight”) came to me and wanted some air time in my writing, they needed to live someplace I loved, someplace where I could imagine them running around town, doing their thing. Somewhere just weird enough but still beautiful where ghosts would be chic and things like New Agey crystals would be acceptable. Without a doubt, these characters needed to live their stories in Cape May. (Btw, you can also find some absolutely gorgeous and amazing pictures of Cape May in my wellness book, Watercharms: Ocean-Reiki Meditations.)

The Mermaid’s Spyglass

Veruca, the main girl-sleuth in The Mermaid’s Spyglass (coming out 2022!) has just moved to Cape May with her dad, and she gets the full-blown ghost experience in her story. She climbs the 199-step lighthouse in a storm, talks to ghosts, tangles with a nasty librarian, and solves a mystery with her new pal, Dylan. Suspicious and homesick at first, Veruca comes to love Cape May. Don’t we all?

“Starling’s Flight”

Same with Starling, a slightly older character who finds herself dumped in Cape May by her mom, to live with her kind grammy who runs a B&B. Dad long gone and friendless, Starling fills her long days waiting on customers…until the day she meets the two sisters who will fill her dreams, help her remember who she really is, and change her life. ProTip: when bullies act up, fight back with history and little magic. Curious? Check out Starling’s story on Youth Imagination and let me know what you think.

Meantime, keep dreaming of waves…

The post The Obsession appeared first on Sylvia M DeSantis.

Series allow an author get all the characters out of her head (nothing to see here) while letting them tell their own stories. If you have read katastrophe, you know that Kat encounters quite a few different people, including classmates, Lily, her neighbor, her dysfunctional family (ugh), and her besties pretty much every day. And whether you think about it consciously or not, these people all have backstories too.

I even had one reader ask for Lily and Dane’s story. She thinks it would be cool to know from where angels come, if they just exist, how they get chosen for assignments from The Council…and what the heck happened to Lily in Seattle?! She’s right, those things are cool and Lily and Dane will eventually share their own stories in a prequel.

First though The Hidden Angel Series will, over time, introduce you to a few of Kat’s classmates. There’s IT geek extraordinaire, Adam Plonski (looks can be deceiving, folks), Gothy pro-ana blogger (so busted) Raven Connelly, cocky LAX bro Traves King, and gloriously transgender Alberta Phun. Four more books. Four more intimate peeks into how these teens negotiate their world.

Each has a story, a perspective, and a lot to say about life, dating, school, drugs, food, crappy situations, sad families, and life. Did you know that Adam tours with Dead tribute bands? Or that Traves’ grandma is in jail? Series have the added bonus of not having to say goodbye when you fall in love with a character, place, or plotline.

Some of my favorite series—aside from the super-obvs older ones like Twilight, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games—include Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle Trilogy (does a trilogy count as a series? Sure, why not.) and Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series. Neither are especially new, but still, both of these showcase smart, savvy young women encountering suspense, mystery, massive family problems, and even, in one case, the supernatural. Great stuff.  

Then there are the one-offs or even the twosies that are so phenomenal, you wish they were a series, like Virginia Bergin’s H2O and follow up, The Storm, both of which will make your skin totally crawl with their apocalyptic creep factor. So good.

Or even Speechless by Hannah Harrington, a book about bullying and what happens when a Mean Girl decides to speak up and out over violence by saying nothing…ever again.

Do you have some favorite series? Let’s hear about them…

The post So Many Characters appeared first on Sylvia M DeSantis.

So, when we talk about a “village” we usually mean people, like moms and spouses and editors and besties. But one thing writers often forget to attribute—or at least I know I do—are amazing books that we’ve read, completely loved, and that always influence us silently and quietly even when we don’t consciously think about them. Most people have at least one of these in their lives: a great read you devoured, then read a few more times, then recommended to others because it was so incredibly good.

One of the most special books that fits this category for me is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Published way back in 1962, this title might not be too familiar (or maybe it is, since the movie came out in 2018—haven’t seen it) but it should be because the book rocks some basic, awesome, and fundamentally human ideals really hard. No wonder I like to write about girls with grit who live inside a supernatural storyline twist.

Meg Murray, teen protagonist, runs the show here, and she’s everything high schoolers fear—awkward, alone, sad, and brilliantly weird. Meg lives with her also-brilliant and beautiful scientist mother, little brother, Charles Wallace (the family genius at only 5) and twins, Sandy and Dennys. No spoilers here so let’s just say that Meg and Charles Wallace end up on a late-night and multi-universe adventure (with Cute Boy From School, Calvin) to find their scientist-dad who has gone missing while in the midst of secret government work.

I love Meg. She’s everything I was but did not want to be, but made it ok somehow. From her completely hopeless frizzy hair (check), awkwardness around Calvin (oh yeah, check), absolute pain and sorrow at her missing dad (though in a slightly different way, but still, yup, check), all the way to her fierce strength and stunning tenacity, she was a girl I could hold on to, someone who would be nice to you at lunch if you were the new kid at school.

Remember, this was crafted in 1962, so no cell phones, Insta, social media of any kind. People lived life, moved on, liked it or didn’t. No commentary shouted out to the world. No blogs, influencers, or trendsetters in the way we know them today. Discomfort, awkwardness, fear, sadness…these belonged (as they always do) to you, and were yours to share (maybe) with friends and family (if that’s how your family dynamic rolled), but not blasted out for the world to see and consume.

Meg negotiated her father’s disappearance with grace and sadness, until the time came when she thought I can do something here, and then did it. This is exactly what I needed as a girl, someone like me—nerdy, frizzy-haired, weird—who made choices, fell hard but always floated to the top, and succeeded where others, less strong, would fail. Meg Murray was my model, my friend, an unknown support I didn’t even realize was there until I too had to sink or swim in the face of tragedy and pain.

I’m admittedly afraid to see the movie because…what if Meg isn’t the same hero of my childhood, the one whose awkwardness propped me up and pulled me through? Nobody wants to negotiate that kind of disappointment. But then I think, wait, the Meg who taught me courage wouldn’t be scared to see a movie. She’d go, take what she wanted and needed, and leave the rest. Right.

Good advice, Meg.

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So what about the rest of the supernatural realm? Though it’s been a few years, no one will be likely to forget Harry Potter (Mista Potta!) or Edward and Bella (“Vampires…sparkle!” Indeed.) any time soon. But what about…angels?

One katastrophe reviewer said that it was like I took a binder of everything I knew about angels and everything I knew about 90s bands and threw them together (“…in a ceiling fan” I believe were her exact words. To be fair, I mention only two 90s bands in this book, and I WAS HOLDING BACK. I lived the 90s. I am the 90s. Freaky, plaid-wearing neighbor girl in pink Docs, right here. Anyway…).

I read that review and thought, Ooooooooh…am I supposed to know things about angels? Because, yeah, not so much. Lily Caleno is an angel (don’t worry, no spoilers) but I had no idea how she was going to act until she did. Ok, so that’s not completely true. I knew she wasn’t going to hang around in wispy wings with a harp, rescuing little old ladies from burning buildings. No, she wasn’t destined for that.

Her path was already a lot darker. 

If you read between the lines (and pick up some of the clues) you can tell that something happened to Lily in Seattle, before she was settled into the area around Phila, working with the kids at Marshall High. Something bad. Have you ever heard that saying, “That which is like unto itself is drawn?” So, in the same way yin and yang make a new whole and certain magnets attract, in my world it made sense to have the mysterious Council send a slightly broken angel to help slightly broken humans. (And really, haven’t angels always been a little broken?)

Any Cassandra Clare fans here? I was blown away when I first read her Clockwork Angel trilogy a few years ago. Good stuff! (I devoured her Shadowhunter series, jumped from there into her Dark Artifices novels, and am now starting her Last Hours books.) Lily as a character already existed when I found Clare’s books, and her and my storylines don’t have much in common…but her characters! Wow. They really underscored for me that when it comes to the supernatural, there are no rules. Logic, sure, because that’s different.

Lily isn’t stupid, dishonest, or careless, so she wouldn’t make bad decisions, lie, or do things in a sloppy way. Flawed, though, opens up some possibilities…she gets testy, impatient, and even a little ruthless. She has friends which, if they are real and true (Dane is both), make us vulnerable to hurt, sadness, and all that good stuff that goes with having an open heart. In some ways she feels almost human. But she’s not, no matter how many earrings she has in or how curated her CD collection seems.
Angels as a concept date waaaay back. You can find Biblical, New Age, and astrological descriptions of angels who are considered messengers, protectors, overseers, and even psychics in their own way, predicting and helping silly humans avoid disaster. Lily does all this and more, in her own way, all while rocking a great lippy.

She’s angelic. She’s wrathful at times. And she cares. Pretty sure that’s all that matters.

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