Following Barren from Beginning to Novella
My novella Barren started life as a short story. The story version, which I started brainstorming in 2013, had a different sort of apocalypse in which only plants had stopped growing. My main character, Lemy, was a much younger woman in the story, having been born after the point when the sea levels rose, creating the ecological devastation. However, the end of the story seemed to open up more questions than it answered, and multiple readers suggested that it might work better as the beginning of a novel.
I struggled with the story for a while, trying a lot of different possibilities, before I acknowledged that yes, it was the beginning of a much bigger story. I was also inspired by the movie Mad Max: Fury Road–I had finished the first draft of the story early in 2015 (yes, it took me two years just to draft the initial short story!), before the movie came out, and after seeing the movie, I was FILLED with ideas!
As I sketched out more details of the world, Lemy became an older woman and the botanical blight evolved into both botanical and biological. This allowed me to get to the core of the story, which was the idea of a place the Wilt didn’t touch. It also informed some of the secondary characters in the story, particularly Sky, who became one of my favorite characters to write (I do love writing children characters!).
I finished the draft of the novella late in 2018, submitted it to some novella markets in 2019 and 2020. As the Pandemic hit, however, I really wanted my book out in the world, and I began the process to finally self-publish the novella and released it in 2021. So after eight years, it was finally in the world, MUCH longer than my original short story!
Barren depicts a gritty and dystopian world, but there’s also a lot of hope and love embodied in this novella. It’s got an older woman as protagonist, LGBTQ+ characters, found family, and more. So if you’re looking for a post-apocalyptic story that isn’t entirely gloom and doom, check it out!
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