The world is about to meet Swayzi, a teenage girl with grave problems, but a supernatural intervention and two stellar guys show her flashes of another possible outcome.
"I was supposed to die. The doctors told me I had only two months to live," Swayzi said. "That was before I met him. Daylan. He was the miracle cure I had been waiting for. With Daylan, I was no longer the small-town girl with that unexplained illness. I was something more. The fate of a magical world depended on my survival, and I longed to go with him. There was only one thing stopping me. Tyler."
Swayzi is quickly becoming one of the northern region's leading teenage ambassadors of magical parallel universes. Jenna Morland knows her best. In fact, Jenna Morland kind of is Swayzi, in that way that all fictional characters are really just manifestations from the mental recesses of their authors. She spent well more than a year hacking and hewing Swayzi out of her imagination and now Morland is ready to unveil her empress.
"I wrote something that I figured I'd want to read," said the Fort St. John writer.
"It came out of me naturally - spilled out of me really. It took about a month and a half to write the first draft, then revising, revising, editing, editing and that took about a year altogether. I don't regret any of the hard work."
The hard work is bundled between the covers of her first novel, Empress Unveiled, released to the world on Sept. 4. by Oftomes Publishing. Morland, who is married to former Prince George resident Gary Morland, is coming to P.G. to see family, visit some friends, and meet the public at a book signing at Coles bookstore on Oct. 6.
What she wants to tell people like herself - who grew up flailing in English class and eschewing diaries, but still a voracious reader, dreamer of dreams and vivid of imagination - is that you can still become an author and put all those creative ideas in your mind out into the world.
"I never found English class stimulating for me. I'm still a terrible speller. But I love reading. I devour reading. I learned the structure and flow of a book from that, just out of instincts from reading and reading and reading."
Since she lacked the post-secondary schooling in novel-craft and publishing, she was unaware how to obtain an agent, how to approach a publisher with her book idea, or that anything in the publishing world was even attainable for someone who just sat down at her keyboard on the long nights when her husband was gone to work out in the fields of the oil and gas industry and the kids were in bed.
"I remember sending it to my sister - nobody but her and my husband even knew I was writing a book - and she responded really positively," Morland said.
"She told me she'd like to see it done as a book, not just a fun project for me, and so it spiraled from there."
It curled into a book deal almost instantly. She spotted an engagement stunt on Twitter for aspiring writers, a thing called a pitch party where you have 150 Twitter characters in which to explain your book. Publishers were lined up in advance to assess the pitches, and the winners would get to cut through to the front of the line to discuss an actual book deal.
Morland's pitch earned the interest of the Oftones team, and the dominoes began to fall.
One of the key features in her favour, she said, was depicting her home landscapes even though it was fictional, stylized and named differently.
"I knew I wanted the setting to be northern, there aren't many novels set up in the north (especially in the Young Adult / Urban Fantasy genres) so I wanted to take advantage of this environment I live in and portray that in the book," she said, noting the visual qualities of northern settings.
"There are a lot of badass moments in this book, so Netflix, if you're listening... You could do a lot with the settings if you filmed a movie version - the ocean, the mountains, the changing of the seasons, the northern lights, the snow - I think would be very cool for everybody to see."
She underscores "everybody" not just the apparent target audience of teenaged girls. She may have written an empress character, but she is no princess of a writer, she laughed. In fact, the first person who physically purchased a hardcopy (as opposed to the tablet versions available) of the book was a 13-year-old boy.
Morland self-identifies as a "Slytherin to the core" to put things in a Harry Potter context. No, not devious nor sinister.
"Yes, Slythrin has its bad people, but what they don't talk about is the ambition and honing your energy towards a goal," she explained. "There are many good qualities to being Slytherin like being able to take your own path, not relying on others, the strength and independence to do something out of the ordinary. That's what I did on the book. I had no degree in literature, I had no agent, I didn't have a list of past publications, so I had to find my own way and I succeed in that."
Will Swayzi succeed? Her life hangs in the balance, she is torn between the affections of two love interests, and she is confronted by the very real possibility that her endangered world may not be the only world in which she could exist.
From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Coles in Pine Centre Mall on Oct. 6, Morland will happily talk about these subjects and even hint at more pages yet to be written as the empress is unveiled.
