Start anywhere you like! Well, what are you proud of about your book right now?
Well, I finished it, for one thing. Oh! I totally forgot–do you want to be one of my beta readers? I told you you could if you wanted lol, sorry for forgetting.
And… actually, I’d like to talk about Leilani Lives. I haven’t written it yet, just a few passages here and there, but this I think will be my pride and joy.
Dunno how much I told y'all about it, but it’s basically a companion book to Death and Other Things I Fail At (that’s a whole other story–all you need to know is a girl named Sophia astral projected herself into the future, and “died” in present time), and one of my favorite things to do with books is to mash genres. I am a huge fan of clichés, I love them a lot, and I love that you can mangle them to death and they’ll still be recognizable.
So Leilani Lives is, at its core, contemporary. But it’s historical fantasy/contemporary. Sort of. It’s a girl who got hit by a car (purposefully or accidentally, even she doesn’t know) and wakes up in a desolated version of her mind palace: a castle set in medieval Spain, in a kingdom called Safe. The world is ravished by a terrifying darkness that twists people into screaming, shadowed versions of themselves. Safe is the last kingdom standing, and Leilani, with the ability to produce a bright, translucent green shield, is the only one who can protect it.
Here, I’ve got the summary:
‘Leilani… isn’t doing well. Her best friend dropped brain dead in the middle of the street, she’s failing every single one of her AP classes, and she may or may not be suicidal. Waking up in some warped version of medieval Spain after getting hit by a car is not on the agenda for getting through to the next day. Her having the power to protect everyone in the kingdom from an evil, suffocating darkness is just downright inconvenient.
Leilani doesn’t want to be here. She especially doesn’t want people depending on her to get them through to the next day. But life moves on, with or without her–and sometimes it’s harder to live for something than it is to die for it.’
Ohhh man, I cannot tell you how excited I am for this book! There’s so much in it–like, Leilani’s this brilliant but arrogant, standoffish Hawaiian girl born and raised in Washington (she’s ashamed of her Hawaiian heritage because she thinks she’s smarter than them–I’m gonna have some fun with her realizing that her culture is rich and beautiful and important to who she is). She met Sophia when they were paired as lab partners in Chemistry… and she found out that one of the most popular girls in school is actually as smart, if not smarter, than she is. So started this bizarre, incredibly intense friendship between a girl who loves too much, all the time, to a girl who’s never felt it and doesn’t know how to reciprocate. And on some level Leilani knows and recognizes that Sophia has the same depression and anxiety issues as she does, but the difference is, Sophia has no idea. She doesn’t really exist outside the expectations of other people. She doesn’t think for herself, just lends herself out like a tool and tries to strive to be good at everything so people will keep her. (Obviously, these characters both have a lot of myself in them.)
So Sophia dies, and Leilani realized that she definitely depended on her way too much, and she has no idea how to grieve, and her major is psychology, consciousness, everything to do with the hypothetical parts of the brain, and she thinks for a long time that Sophia killed herself, and she just does not cope with it at all.
So she’s hit by a car, and she’s comatose in the hospital, and this world is fine and all but she really just wants to sleep. Except everyone she’s ever loved and who’ve ever loved her, whether she realized it or not, are lumped together in this castle and she had to protect them from the darkness–a darkness created, by the way, by an “evil” Leilani called Harm.
Of course, Harm is the physical manifestation of Leilani’s depression–or, more accurately, her suicide ideation. She’s not evil, she’s tired. I’m so excited because of course this is literally Leilani fighting herself, her urge to just give up and let herself sleep, but doing so will sacrifice all of her loved ones, and even though she can be a real bitch sometimes, she still loves people. And she’s been on the receiving end of that, remember? She’d never wish that on anyone.
So she’s stuck here in limbo, and she has to make a choice, and Sophia–OH WAIT SORRY. I forgot to tell you about Sophia!
So Sophia shows up from time to time to fill in that archetypical role of The Mentor, or The Conscience, or essentially an annoyingly righteous version of Leilani’s best friend who urges her to do the right thing. The fun part? Leilani didn’t make her up. Sophia is literally an astral projection–in her book she blinks out sometimes, and when she gets back she has no idea where she’s been. Surprise! She takes trips into Leilani’s brain! So Leilani is arguing with the real Sophia, who doesn’t know what’s going on but does recognize that her death (she insists constantly that she’s not actually dead) had some major repercussions.
SO where was I… yeah, I mean, basically that’s it. It’s focused on grief (I AM ALWAYS A SLUT FOR GRIEF), and with strong emphasis on female friendships (I AM ALWAYS A SLUT FOR PLATONIC RELATIONSHIPS) and how “love is perpetual” and people are just impressions and pieces you take with you if and when you leave, and that sometimes there are no happy endings because life doesn’t just stop, even if you do. And in the end, Leilani doesn’t know why she would ever want to keep going. Why she would lock away Harm, at least for the time being, and stand up and continue to survive when she’s so damn tired, and it wouldn’t be that bad for her because she’d be gone. And Leilani looks up at her counterpart and she says, very quiet, “But I’m willing to find out.”
(Spoiler alert: she lives.)
