Moon And Morning came out on Monday, and I am super excited (as always) to welcome this one to the world 🙂 This is one of my favourite stories, coming out of the lockdown challenge I did back in April of 2020 during our first covid-19 lockdown (writing 6 stories in 14 days). (This means, of course, that you can also pick it up as part of the April Showers collection that came out in April this year.)
Moon And Morning feels very personal to me because it’s set in Canberra, where I live, and is more specifically set during the annual Skyfire fireworks event. These fireworks are a key cornerstone of my … I was going to say childhood, but honestly just my whole life. I’ve been every year that it’s been on (which is every year, minus a couple for covid), including the years I lived interstate. I have memories ranging from being there as a child and weaving our way back to the car through the thronging crowds afterward holding my dad’s hand, through to feeding my now-10-year-old as a baby curled over him in the rain with a huge blanket tunnelled around a row of about five of us – myself, my sisters, my step-brothers, my husband, I don’t know, some combination of the above – through to my kids last year gallivanting around in the dusk bedecked with obligatory glow sticks.
I couldn’t pack all of that into the short story, of course… But I think you’ll see glimpses of a lot of it, as well as a whole lot of love and affection for the event itself.
It’s an affirming story about the important of belonging and family and siblings and cousins, about magic and who you turn to for help with problems – and about teenage girls Knowing Their Tropes 😀
I hope you love it. <3
Rory appreciates her big, sprawling family—and the beauty of twilight down at the lake—but sometimes she wishes she felt a little bit less like a freakish unicorn and a little bit more like she belonged.
Then a strange (cute) boy trips over her as they wait for the fireworks to begin; but Rory knows how that story goes, and she has better things to do with her time. Especially when disaster strikes in the dark.
Suddenly, the boy’s motivations? Yeah, majorly, majorly questionable, threatening everything Rory holds dear.
A richly imagined story for the postmodern reader who knows that teenage girls are as smart as they come, and family matters more than anything.