OLDS – Local librarian Lesley Moody has created a challenge for herself.
She wants to write a trilogy.
The first of those three books has already been published. It’s called Charred: An Adventure In Wonderland.
It’s set in Wonderland — as in Alice In Wonderland — about 150 years in the future.
It’s junior fiction, written for youth about 12 to 15 years old.
“We find our young protagonist, Alice, has been transported to Wonderland,” Moody said during an interview with the Albertan.
“She goes on an adventure. The Queen of Hearts, or the Red Queen, so to speak, is long gone, but her sister has taken over, and she's much worse than the Queen of Hearts, and so she joins a rebellion and their cyborgs and some fun technology things.
“So it's kind of like a in the future sci-fi twist on Alice in Wonderland.”
Moody said she’s always liked “fractured fairy tales, or taking a fairy tale and reimagining it.”
She said fictional short stories that she’s published have all been “slight retellings or a different bent on a fairy tale.”
“I've always liked Wonderland, and I just one day was like, ‘this would be a good story to tell.’ So I wrote the opening scene. And once I was happy with that, then the rest kind of just came to me,” she said.
But it’s not like she sat down, wrote it and published it all in one go. The process took years, starting in about 2018.
She wrote the initial draft during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November that year.
“Basically they you challenge yourself to write a whole novel in a month. So I made my target goals. I wrote my outline and sat down and wrote it,” she said.
However, hammering out that draft turned out to be the easy part.
It received continual edits over the years as friends read it and gave Moody feedback. She also just put it aside for long stretches of time.
Moody was asked, “when did you complete it? When were you happy with it?”
“Well, I was never going to be happy with it,” she said. “I rewrote it and rewrote it.”
However, Moody said, many authors, including herself are never really happy with their works.
“Even the very popular authors often have this, you know, -- not good enough syndrome, like, ‘not me,’” she said.
“It's never good enough. And so I was always like, ‘yeah, it's a, a nice little pet project for Lesley, but it's probably never going to go anywhere.’
“But I had a few friends that were like, ‘no, it's very good. You should go ahead and publish it.’”
So she did.
She decided to self-publish it via Amazon because she said sending work to traditional publishers can be a long, arduous process, often with disappointing results.
“Often, a lot of the big publishers won't even look at you if you don't have an agent or something like that,” Moody said.
It’s now available in Olds at Pandora’s Box & Tea, which Moody and her husband Jason run. Some libraries around the province have it.
“I've had some sales in the UK, sales in in the ‘States, and it's also available on Amazon, Amazon Kindle Direct, so people can download it and read it for free, and you get paid per page read basically,” Moody said.
“It is actually really nice to have it out there. And you know, I've gotten some really great, positive reviews on Amazon,” she said. “Most of my sales have been through the store here.That's one of the downfalls of self-publishing, is that it's all on you to try and get your the word out there about your book.”
She’s not resting on her laurels though.
“I know that it's going to be a trilogy. It's just working on book 2 right now, so hopefully it doesn't take me another 10 years to to get out,” she said with a smile.
Charred isn’t actually Moody’s first novel. She’s written a couple of others, but she downplays them, describing them as “just pre-practice” works.
She also had a short story which she describes as “a kind of a take on Little Red Riding Hood” published in an anthology.
She also has another short story that may be coming out in another anthology.
“The theme was librarians, which is why they contacted me and said, ‘do you want to write something for this? It's kind of right up your alley, but it's sci fi, librarians of the future.’
“And so my story is set on another planet. And then love, the librarian is on another planet, archiving artefacts that are found on other planets.
“And she ends up finding a spaceship with a human in it. The human is asleep. So yeah, it also has a mild fairy tale bent to it, because that's what I do,” she said.
Moody was asked if she thinks there’ll be libraries in the future.
“Absolutely, absolutely there'll be libraries in the future. Of course; that is the only hope for humanity,” she said with a smile.
Okay, sounds really cool. Yeah. How many pages is it?
Q So when you were in high school or whatever and you were thinking about your future, did you want to be a librarian? Did you want to be an author?
Moody has always loved stories; created some of her own in scribblers when she was a young girl.
But she struggled with reading and didn’t read her first full novel until middle school with the help of a tutor.
But she blossomed when given the chance by a teacher to choose books to read.
“I didn't picture myself a librarian, and I didn't picture myself anything to do with books,” she said.
“So it's just very interesting that I have the bookstore and I have the library, and I've written books now, considering how much of a struggle it was for me growing up.”
