Today’s teaser is about kissing. Man, I love writing about kissing. Being able to write about kissing, about anxiety over kissing, and about first kisses, is one of the big draws for me about YA. I guess I could talk about it if I wrote romance novels, too, but that’s just not the same.

Some background: Terra and Koen are sixteen, and passengers on the generation ship Maia. Koen is apprentice to Terra’s dad, the ship’s clockkeeper, and he’s recently asked Terra for her hand in marriage. But he’s only kissed her once. Without tongue. Angst! Here we go.

Koen seemed to be making a point not to look at me, instead gazing off into the distance where the street widened out into a brick-faced path that ran between the cornfields. His big eyes were narrowed, as if in thought. But he didn’t say anything, just took firm steps forward, blowing the warm air of his breath into his gloved hands.

My throat tightened. I’d said something wrong—again. As we walked down the path, through the dead, towering cornstalks that bent like dusty bones toward us, I began to chew on my lip, peeling away the dry skin, tasting blood. If I were Jeni or one of the other girls I’d know what to do or say as I walked beside Koen. I’d know how to prove myself, to prove that I was worthy of the thing he’d asked of me—marriage, a partnership. Love. But what did I know about love? Only the strange moanings of my parents down the hall when I was little, and the hot violet dreams I had at night, wrong dreams, embarrassing dreams, dreams I didn’t want to tell anyone about, least of all the tall, handsome boy who walked by my side.

And so I did the only thing I could think of. I let my gloved hand dart out of my pocket, and up, and grabbed Koen’s hat from his head, and took off running down the path.

“Hey!” he called, and broke out in rough laughter. “Hey!”

I grinned, pumping my arms, speeding forward along the path. Part of me kind of hated what I was doing—clutching his hat in my fist, blushing as I heard the sound of Koen’s footfall pounding behind me. It seemed cute, and kind of coy. Like something Jeni might do. But it was easy to run, much easier than it was to stand by Koen’s side and take tiny, measured steps and feel like I might screw up at any moment. I saw a gap in the rows of corn coming up on my left, and I stepped off the path and into it, kicking up loose soil with my boot soles as I did.

“Terra, where are you going?” More of Koen’s laughter came tumbling toward me. I pressed forward through the scratchy, bone-yellow leaves. Until that moment, I hadn’t had any idea where I was headed, but now I knew: the lower level of the arboretum, the place where I used to walk with Momma, the place I most often visited in dreams. I reached the far end of the cornfield, spilling back out onto another cracked-stone pathway, and continued down it. Soon, I came to an overpass, a rusted metal bridge that seemed to rise up out of the soggy ground on iron girders. I went to the edge, touching the cold metal rail in my free hand. Below, broken branches and briar bushes formed a tangled net. I looked back over my shoulder—Koen had just broken through to the far end of the field, his hair a ruddy smudge amidst all that yellow—drew in a breath, and launched myself over the side.

It was a little dramatic, even for me. My boots hit the hard soil, and I pitched forward, just barely able to catch myself before I fell face-first in the dirt. The force of impact sent a ringing through my ears. But as I gazed up, through a cloud of foresty perfume, the scent of dry pine needles and moss, I knew it was worth it—Koen was staring at me over the rail, those brown eyes deep pools of surprise.

“Are you okay?” he called. I gave a small, breathless nod, and flashed my teeth at him to show it was true. Then I watched Koen’s eyes trace a line between where he stood and the ground below, that twelve-foot gap. A look of fear crossed over his brow, so quick that I almost missed it.

“You shouldn’t have looked!” I called back, laughing. For a moment, Koen’s eyes went skyward.

“I’ll come around,” he replied.

I waited there in the shadowed clearing. At first I only stayed where I landed, crouched against the ground. But then a moment passed without any sign of Koen, and I started to get anxious again. I walked over to one of the metal girders that held up the overpass, pressing my spine against it. The metal was so cold that I could feel the bite of it straight through my woolen layers, both coat and sweater. But I stood with my shoulders square against it anyway, resting my hand first on my hip, then in my pocket, awkwardly shifting, suddenly intensely aware of what I looked like, and trying vainly, desperately, to look effortless.

“Hey!”

I jumped, dropping Koen’s hat on the ground. He came around the corner, his grin stretched almost from one ear to the other.

“Crud,” I muttered, and stooped over to pick it up. I tried to brush the dust off it, but the gray dirt seemed to want to cling to the nubby fibers. Koen came over and took it from me, pulling it down over his pink-tipped ears.

“Thanks,” he said dryly.

He was standing close—so close that I could feel the warmth of his chest through my raised gloves. I lifted my chin. Koen’s eyelids were down, showing only the smallest sliver of brown beneath his thick lashes. I could see the slight line of fuzz along his jaw line, could smell the sharp scent of his body, a familiar cedar scent that I couldn’t quite place.

Then the clocktower bells rang out, deep and hollow, and I remembered: the floorboards beneath the bells. It was my father’s smell, too, or another version of it. Koen’s eyes flickered up to me. They met mine, and for a moment, I was sure this was it—he was going to bend close and kiss me again, at last.

But instead he drew away, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “We should go,” he said, as he turned his shoulder to me, starting down the shadowed path. “It’s late.”

I let out a gasp of breath, one I hadn’t even realized I was holding, and followed Koen through the darkening forest.

The time change has been incredibly productive for me. A few weeks ago, I made the decision to try and wake up early to get writing done before work. That was an utter failure; I was too exhausted to be functional, much less creative. But since we’ve reset the clocks, I’ve been pretty much effortlessly waking early (the cat, who doesn’t understand clocks and just wants his breakfast, dammit, is a big help, too) and getting a bit done every day. I’ve just now–right now!–reached 27,000 words, and the end of the first section of the novel. It’s pretty rough, but I’m enjoying it.

One of the surprises has been how fond I’m becoming of one of my supporting characters, Mara MacGregor. If you remember from my last Daughter of Earth teaser, my main character, Terra, is an apprentice botanist. Mara is her boss, the ship’s botanist, and a bit of a pistol. She’s incredibly fun to write. This is one of the darker passages featuring her and Terra. It’s rough (drafty draft is . . . drafty!), but I hope you enjoy:

We walked through the dimming light together. Only a few spots of brightness remained in the forest—a few black-limbed trees still clung to their leaves, which throbbed like green-yellow hearts against the shifting shadows. Mara pointed out how, between rotting trunks, a few skinny pine trees were pushing their way up through the detritus.

“These were planted last year,” she said, kneeling in the mud to touch one of the prickly branches to her palm. Then she turned her steely eyes to me. “Even though we arrive on Aurelia in less than six months. Why?”

“Um.” I chewed on my lip, scanning through my memory, back through years of school lessons where I’d barely clung to consciousness. “Well, we need oxygen until we establish orbit . . .” I could tell from the way that Mara lowered her eyebrows that that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. “And . . .”

“And there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to actually live on the surface of Aurelia when we get there.”

I frowned, watching as she stood and dusted her hands against her trousers. “What do you mean, there’s no guarantee?!” I couldn’t help it. Disbelief spilled out as soon as I opened my mouth.

“Terra,” she said. Mara’s voice was tinged with disappointment. “What are they teaching you kids in school these days? Almost everything we think we know about Aurelia is based on conjecture—we can guess certain things about a moon like Aurelia based on how far it is from its planet and sun, and how big it is, and how long the orbit is, and the rotation. But things like atmospheric composition? The presence of water? And whether it can support life? And more, life like ours?” She shrugged her thin shoulders, like what she was suggesting was nothing. Then she added, in a tired voice: “You should know this, Terra. You know that our ancestors sent many ships to many planets—because there was no guarantee we would make it, and no guarantee that any of these planets could support life.”

“What happens if it can’t?” I demanded. Anger mounted in my voice. “What happens if we get to Aurelia and can’t even live there?”

Mara smiled loosely, a toothy grimace of a smile. “Well, then we detach the ship’s dome. And land it. And remain within the glorious prison of the Maia.”

My eyes widened. I looked up, searching for the shining glass beneath the broken boughs and shifting dead leaves. I’d never thought of the Maia as a prison before—in fact, I hardly ever thought about her at all. She was home, just like our quarters or my room. I paid her as much mind as I did my hands, or my feet.

But I’d thought ahead plenty. In school, staring at the foggy glass of the two-way mirror (the other room was empty; it was only a polite fiction that we all maintained, pretending like we couldn’t tell when we were being watched) as Teach droned on and on, I’d thought about life on Aurelia. I’d thought about things I’d only heard named in songs or books. Thunderstorms. The ocean. Sky. Desert. I’d thought about unknown continents. Sometimes, I’d even doodled maps on the margin of my notebook. I’d always known that some day, some other world—some other life waited for me.

And now, with Mara staring at me, her hands against her hips, I thought of what life might be like if that was taken away. And I felt something inside me crumble. I wanted to cry out. I wanted to bang my fists against that glass ceiling, gleaming in the distance, and demand to be let out.

“The probe,” I said quickly, almost spitting the words. “The probe will tell us whether we can live on Aurelia or not.”

Mara gave a slow nod of her head. She reached out, and fixed her wrinkled hand against my shoulder. And gave it a squeeze.

“Good,” she said. And I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that somewhere beneath the surface of her voice, I heard a wavering—tears? “Good. Now you understand.”

Hey, look, it’s Tuesday.

Dedicated Phoebe-readers might remember that, like, a month ago, I promised that I would be participating in Teaser Tuesdays once again with my new novel, Trip. I was ambitious: for two weeks, I promised that I’d pair music with excerpts and I made veiled references to how awesome and crazy this manuscript was (with time travel! and aliens! and cute boys making out with each other!). But then something happened.

The project died.

It happens, sometimes. In the two years that I’ve been honing my novel-writing skills, it’s happened precisely twice. Both times, I had entire stories planned out in my head (which is where I always plan my stories). There, they seemed sparkling, exciting, and alive. Both times, by the time I was a thousand or so words in, I knew I had a problem.

This time, I tried to push past it. My crit-group members were steaming away at their own projects, and I didn’t want to get left behind. And this idea sounded so exciting when I talked about it–multiple timelines and narrators! implications of incest! and stuff!–that I thought that maybe I could get through it, break through my wall of reservations. I kept going for nearly 10,000 words.

And they sucked. I didn’t want to write. I felt little enthusiasm for the characters, who were flat, and bland, despite having all the trappings of being interesting people. When I hit that first, big benchmark, I knew that I was doomed. Worse, I’d come up with a new story idea, and found myself eagerly brainstorming about that, rather than Trip. It became apparent to me that I had to let go.

It’s difficult to admit that a project has failed, that it’s dead-on-the-page, that it’ll go no further. And the death of Trip made me feel reluctant to talk about my new project here. I didn’t want to repeat that failure, and publicly. I didn’t want to curse myself. I didn’t want this project to die.

But today, I’ll reach 20,000 words on it, and I’m confident that this project has legs. Hell, I knew that a chapter in. The difference in my own engagement and enthusiasm was immediately palpable. Part of this is genre: for the first time in a year, I’m returning to writing long form YA space-based science fiction. I forgot how much I love writing this, how the tropes and the rules feel easy for me, natural–because they’re what I love best. I don’t regret the two manuscripts spent writing fantasy; they were integral to my growth as a writer. But this is what comes naturally to me. I really am a sci-fi geek at heart.

And so, ladies and gents, I introduce to you Daughter of Earth, and my first DOE teaser. A bit of background on the premise: fifteen-year-old Terra lives on the generation ship Maia, which is bound for a planet called Aurelia and will be arriving there in a few short months after almost 500 years in space. Life on the Maia is regimented: jobs are assigned (Terra is apprentice to a botanist), and marriages are made at 16, with two artificially-created children born to each couple just a few years later. Terra’s always been an odd-duck, though, ever since her mother died a few years ago. She’s not happy with her life there–and she’ll soon discover that many of the ship’s residents share her sentiments when she discovers an on-board rebellion, and witnesses the murder of the rebellion’s leader.

A lot of that will come later, though. This is mostly to introduce you to the ship, and to Terra, her father, and her father’s apprentice–the boy she may or may not, eventually, wed:

Autumn set in, and this year there were hardly any green leaves to turn gold. Instead, half-budded flowers browned and froze without blooming, and many of the fields that stretched out beneath the arboretum dome lay fallow, with little to harvest. It was an autumn of root vegetables and pickled things and lots and lots of cabbage—I saw, for the first time, what Mara had meant when she called those hearty, all-weather foods “rubbish”—and though many of the high-ranking families raised their objections, the rest of us just plodded ahead with little more than obligatory grumbling. This early winter, was, of course, for our own good, for the good of the Maia and the passengers on her.

The days were frigid. I piled on layer after layer every morning before work. Long, holey under shorts, torn stockings, tall socks. That autumn I began to outgrow most of my old sweaters, and so I went into Daddy’s room one day when he was working late and filched all of Momma’s cold weather clothes. I hated to do it, but I wouldn’t begin to collect my wages until I turned sixteen and I knew that it would be an argument if I asked. They all still smelled like her, that strange mixture of her shampoo and dusty flour, still, after all these years, and for that I hated to wear them, too—hated to cover her smell with my smell, hated to wash the last trace of her away. Daddy must have noticed that I had replaced my old threadbare clothing with her finer stuff, but the only acknowledgment was a long, blank look one morning at breakfast.

We spoke less and less. Within the gray walls of our quarters, silence became a constant companion. It sat beside us at breakfast and laid itself down between me and Pepper late at night. That is, except when Koen was around. He stopped by for dinner at least once a week, obliterating the empty echo of our lives with his broad-lipped smile; his brayed, awkward laughter; his questions for my father; his jokes for me. Dad was a different person when Koen was there. He sat straighter, spoke with more force. He rarely angered and when he did, it was only ever at me, and always brief. But I gave him few reasons to be mad at me. Usually, I just listened while he and Koen discussed their duties—how to turn the seasons, how to ease us into the coming frost. The way they talked about it, it sounded more like an art than a science. Like how you layer one color under another so that the depth contained in all that light could show through. I said that once, over dinner, blurted the words between bites of boiled potatoes. And was surprised to see how both Daddy and Koen put down their forks to gawp at me.

“It’s nothing so soft as an art,” my father said. I was surprised, too, by how patient he sounded. Like my old father was back, and ready to teach me all about being a proper Maian. “We’re forcing our bodies—your body, Terra—into new patterns. Why do you think we take these pills every day with dinner?” He gestured with his fork to the little white dish of capsules that offset his plate. “You wouldn’t sleep otherwise. Humans weren’t made for thirty-six hour days, for twenty week years, with two seasons. Everything must be factored in. It’s no art.” He paused, eying me for a moment. “I’d think as Mara MacGregor’s apprentice, you’d know that.”

Inside, I recoiled. What had I learned from Mara so far, on all those days when she shipped me off to the greenhouses to keep me out of her hair? The names of plants, sure—I could look at a clipping of almost anything in the main greenhouse without even stopping to think. But little else. Still, I kept my expression steady. So I’d said something stupid. I didn’t have to let on that I felt stupid, too.

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

I traced the sound of Koen’s voice across the table. He’d muttered the words down onto his plate, but once they were out he lifted his head and looked my father directly in the eye. It was the kind of thoughtless comment that always lead to an argument for me—but Koen only regarded my father calmly, speaking as he chewed.

“With all due respect, sir, I think Terra was speaking metaphorically. And I think she meant it as a compliment. She’s not so far off, anyway. Like good art, our work is the sort that looks effortless if you don’t know any better. It’s part of the background of everyone’s lives. It doesn’t call attention to itself. To most of them, I’m sure we’re nothing more than bell-ringers. And frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Let them think less of us. If our work went around announcing itself, it would mean that we’d done something wrong.”

My father looked at him for a long moment, gave a sort of grunt of agreement, and stared back down at his meal. I could the grin spread across my face.

“Thank you,” I mouthed soundlessly to Koen. His big brown eyes flinted and shone, but he only shrugged at me, as if it was nothing.

I don’t know how I would have gotten through those weeks without Koen—all those bright, muggy days alone in the greenhouse, all those dark, shivery nights at home in our dusty quarters. I wouldn’t have said that we were friends, exactly. But he was the only person who gave any indication that he understood me, the only one on our whole big ship who seemed to regard me with a single ounce of empathy or care.

So I was surprised when Mara sent me to the library one day, and I ran into him, and he treated me like I was no one at all.

I haven’t been playing along with Teaser Tuesday in the past few weeks–too busy with queries and edits to get any real writing done. But a new project has been floating around on the back of my mind. I need to do some prewriting for it; this one is going to necessitate much more planning than any previous project. But one of my narrators was begging me to jump in last night, so I sat down and banged out an opening passage. Richie, take it away:

1 – Richie

It was the summer everything was fucked.

Like our cell phones, and the wifi. On the news they kept saying that it had something to do with solar flares. It was a hot kind of summer, rainless and blistering even in June, and after the sun went down I could almost see them—crimson tongues of the sun, searing out in curling waves into the black, black night, and I could almost believe it was true when I shouted into the phone, “No! Wait! Don’t!” and my own voice and a rush of static echoed back to me, and then a stuttered pause, and then Aadi, through laughter, said: “What? What? I can’t hear you! I’m coming over!”

And then I threw the phone down, and it bounced against my wallpaper, the stupid teddy bears in their baseball uniforms. And I got up and went to get dressed, feeling nauseous at the thought of it, at the thought of Aadi, of his soft lips and onyx hair.

Because I’d been having dreams for weeks. The kind you’re not supposed to have about your best friend. About Aadi. About his hands falling against my neck. About the way he looked in his boxer shorts, the lean line of his hips veering out of the elastic. About how it would feel when I crushed my chest against his.

Like I said, it was the summer everything was fucked.

I also came up with a little Seas Run Dry playlist this afternoon–it’s a summer soundtrack of music I love. Only a few of the songs are referenced even obliquely in the text, but I think it captures the mood of the book nicely. I’ll be up on the book’s page shortly, but I share it with you now, to get you in a summer mood before August ends.

Music Playlist at MixPod.com