We walked through the crops and removed weeds and insects by hand and picked and sorted produce at harvest time. I had brothers and sisters from many different parents. The technician leaves and I am alone again. My dad used to say that plants grew better if you talked to them. I prefer the other, the one who talks to me and explains what she’s doing and the meaning of it all. They probably think I don’t understand, that I’m just a child, but I grew up learning about plants and crops. I soak it in through my skin and combine it with water and light to make sugar for energy. The technicians wear masks to avoid breathing in the carbon dioxide rich air. I cannot pull nutrients and water out of the soil like a plant. The movement of the air changes around me and there is a whoosh and the sound of footsteps. I can no longer see the mirrors and lights of my cubicle through the green of the chloroplasts in my eyes. I took on the subject of an agricultural dystopia and wrote the following short piece. The idea was that a visual artist would respond to or use ideas from the piece to create pieces of art. The Vine is set in the same world as my upcoming novel, Star-Scorched Fingertips, and follows the story of the character Rae.īack in February 2020 author Alanah Andrews alerted me to an opportunity to submit a short descriptive piece picturing an element of life 50 years in the future (Australia 2070) for consideration for an upcoming Dystopian/Utopian exhibition at Artisan in Brisbane. My story The Vine was published in December 2022 in Red Dwarfs Make The Best Homes. The next exciting thing to happen was when I was contacted by Seth Lukas Hynes to submit a story for an anthology he was putting together about space colonization and the Kardashev scale. I’m currently still working on a story called Silphion (or Silphium- I haven’t decided yet) about the resurrection of an extinct culinary plant that was revered in ancient Greece and Rome)- this is looking about novella length at the moment but may stretch to a novel. Throughout 20 I continued working on characters from this world where humans are genetically engineered to adapt to the hunger caused by environmental devastation and climate change. Stories collected & edited by Jessica Augustssonĭarksleep is the first story in a series I’ve called The Alimental Institute. Darksleep is the story of a child genetically engineered to photosynthesize and was adapted from a short piece I wrote to accompany artwork by Clare Poppi in an exhibition at Artisan gallery in Brisbane in 2021.Ĭover of Grandpa’s Deep Space Diner. I never stopped submitting- I just stopped being disappointed when my queries came to nothing.įirstly my story, Darksleep, was accepted for publication in Grandpa’s Deep Space Diner by JayHenge Publishing. I returned to writing for the joy of writing, with no expectation of ever seeing my words in print. And no one was interested in the two Neandertal novellas I had on offer (still can’t get any interest in them, unfortunately).īy the beginning of 2022 I decided I couldn’t rely on validation from the publishing industry to motivate my writing. I had no interest in my novel (which went through multiple name changes before landing on Star-Scorched Fingertips) and I couldn’t sell a short story to save my life (I did have one short story published in 2021, For Autumn, in Revolutions by Deadset Press). 2022 has been a great year of writing achievements for me.Ģ0 were terrible.
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