The idea for my next project came from this comic I saw on Facebook. It was simple as that. I didn’t want to do a Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland retelling. That’s overly done, and I’m not interested in writing children.
I pitched the idea of Dorothy and Alice as private detectives and writing an urban fantasy/cozy mystery mashup series to my Facebook writing group Speculative Twist (https://www.facebook.com/groups/544023183188247). The group gave me a lot of support and encouragement. Many suggested the duo would suffer PTSD after their experience. That gave me more ideas of where I could go thematically with the series and character arcs.
So, while I’m writing Eastside Faerie, the sequel to Eastside Hedge Witch, I’m also going to be doing a lot of research.
In the meanwhile, I wrote a teaser prologue and/or back of the cover blurb to get the creative juices flowing. Here it is:
Turns out, it wasn’t all a dream.
My traumatized thirteen year old brain hadn’t made up the surreal horrors I’d experienced in Oz. When I was in college, I found a newspaper article about a Kansan girl reported missing by her aunt and uncle. The description fit. The names and dates fit.
I confronted auntie Em. She confessed they hid the truth because they had no clue what had happened to me and didn’t want to believe the fantastical stories coming out of my thirteen year old mouth. They were salt of the Earth Kansan farmers, not prone to believe fanciful stories about witches and robots.
But, they’d all seen me drop out of the sky and land in the pigsty, unconscious and broken.
My auntie, uncle, and the farm hands all made a pact that it was best just to go along with my assumption that I’d dreamt it all. No harm. No foul. Right?
Except, that was over a hundred years ago and everyone who could have told me what had happened or why I haven’t aged a day since I hit nineteen are all dead.
At least when I met Alice, I learned I wasn’t the only one and didn’t have to figure it out alone. Together, we started Dot and Al’s Detective Agency. Eventually we’ll figure out what happened to us and why we’re immortals with a few other perks, one missing person case at a time.
Written material ©Tammy Deschamps