The Moment Everything Changed: Part 4

Today we bring you stories from T.A. White and Shalini Abeysekara.

T.A. White

I’ve kind of always been drawn to the art of storytelling. From a very young age, I can remember sitting at my grandparents’ feet and listening to tales of yesteryear. That wonder later manifested into attempting to write ghost stories with my fellow camp goers. I say “attempt” because as children are prone to do, my fellow aspiring writers decided the very next day they wanted to play other games instead. This resulted in what henceforth became known as the cookie fiasco. (I threw the cookies I was passing out at their heads. The camp councilors no longer trusted me with the task of food distribution after that.)

I’d say my true “aha” moment didn’t happen until I was in third grade. My parents came to one of the school open house events. We’d written essays the week prior. When my mom read mine, she exclaimed “it looks like we have a writer in the family”. On some level, I’d known what I wanted for years, but that really put it into words I could grasp and identify with. From then on, I knew that whatever else I became, I would also be a writer.

Fast forward a decade or two and I’m in the military and deployed to Afghanistan. You’d think being in a war zone working long hours would be enough to keep you occupied. Turns out not. There are also only so many books, tv shows and movies that you can consume before you go a little stir crazy. A few months in I decided to do something I’d been talking about for years. I was going to write a book. It wasn’t the first book I wrote, that happened in high school, but it would be the first book I published. Self-publishing was becoming more prominent and feasible and I thought why not.

That book was an abject failure but I didn’t quit. I wrote a second book. That book found an audience. Then they went and read my first book. It’s been a wild ride ever since.

T.A.’s Featured Release

Rules of Redemption

The war everyone thought was over is just beginning.

Kira Forrest is a survivor. She’s risen above the pain of her beginnings to become a war hero only to leave it all behind in the pursuit of a simple life. Now a salvager, she makes a living sifting through the wreckage of dead alien ships from a war that nearly brought humanity to its knees.

After her ship takes damage, she’s forced to re-route to a space station where her past and present collide with dangerous consequences.

Kira’s existence holds the key to a faltering peace treaty with the Tuann—a technologically advanced alien race who dislikes and distrusts all humans. Winning her freedom should be easy, but a powerful and relentless Tuann warrior stands in her way. Deceiving him seems impossible, especially when he strays dangerously close to secrets she struggles to hide.

Can Kira reconcile the pain of her past with the possibilities of her future? The fate of two races depends on her success.

Shalini Abeysekara

There are dreams that you can swipe with your fingertips and those that feel entirely out of reach. Writing was the latter for me. As the eldest daughter of a household swimming below the poverty line, the words ruling my life were “financial stability.” Then came Tolkien.

It was 2012. I’d borrowed the DVD of The Hobbit. Popped it into the family desktop. Fell utterly in love within 15 minutes. That film gave me what Gandalf gave a perplexed Bilbo: the sense that I could dare dream of more. I wanted to create worlds that did the same: give others a moment of respite in their laden lives, and perhaps the strength to keep persevering in them. So, with all the brilliance and gumption of a seventeen-year-old, I began writing.

I’d always been a voracious reader, devouring David Eddings, Lynn Kurland, and Anne McCaffrey at thirteen, then Ilona Andrews themselves (!), Jeaniene Frost, Kresley Cole, and Gena Showalter a couple years later. (Reading PNR earlier than we should have is a canonical event, isn’t it? My mom did side-eye my rotation of covers with shirtless men, but mercifully didn’t forbid me so long as my grades were good.) 

I drew maps. I built twelve countries. I wrote a whole book and queried it at eighteen. One year and over three hundred rejections later, I slunk off into the ether to lick my wounds and told myself, “Never again.”

Financial stability returned to ruling my life. I went to law school, checked boxes, navigated the minefield of corporate life while being autistic. All the while, I ignored the writing bug gnawing at me, but life has a funny way of taking you full circle. And lightning miraculously struck twice.

In 2021, I devoured a Korean drama called The Devil Judge with my favourite actor (Ji Sung). I felt seen and heard in a way I never thought possible, and I suddenly wanted to try the entire mad dance again: writing, querying, hoping. So, I did.

This Monster of Mine took shape over fourteen months. I finished it in November of 2022, began querying in January of 2023, got agented in May, and got a book deal in August. The book and its sequel are now out in the world. Portions of that map I drew at eighteen are now in print. I have never been happier. I’ve also never been more anxious!

It’s a lucky author who is on speaking terms with financial stability, and I certainly can’t lay claim to that. This business of writing and dreaming is a crucible. But regardless of where publishing takes me, I’m awed to have gotten to stand on the shoulders of giants, to add my book to the enormous lexicon of works published, to see people genuinely love these characters even more than I do, and to have met my heroes and walked away giddy.

What a privilege. What a dream.

Shalini’s Featured Release

This Monster of Mine

She knows the taste of death. He’ll stoke her hunger for it.

Eighteen-year-old Sarai doesn’t know why someone tried to kill her four years ago, but she does know that her case was closed without justice. Hellbent on vengeance, she returns to the scene of the crime as a Petitor, a prosecutor who can magically detect lies, and is assigned to work with Tetrarch Kadra. Ice-cold and perennially sadistic, Kadra is the most vicious of the four judges who rule the land – and the prime suspect in a string of deaths identical to Sarai’s attempted murder.

Certain of his guilt, Sarai begins a double life: solving cases with Kadra by day and plotting his ruin by night. But Kadra is charming and there’s something alluring about the wrath he wields against the city’s corruption. So, when the evidence she finds embroils her in a deadly political battle, Sarai must also fight against her attraction to Kadra – because despite his growing hold on her heart, his voice matches the only memory she has of her assailant…

A dazzling Ancient Rome-inspired romantasy debut, This Monster of Mine is a bloodbath of manipulation, deception, and forbidden love.

Read previous posts in this series: The Moment Everything Changed.