The Locked Door
Women's Fiction with a sci-fi twist
80,000 words

Hannah Paladino's life hasn't turned out as she hoped. Her naval officer husband, Nathan, is deployed on a submarine, leaving her with three rambunctious preschoolers and a chaotic house heaped with boxes. Isolated and frustrated, Hannah searches for meaning in a life that consists of changing diapers and counting the hours until Nathan's return. Even God seems to have been packed away in a box and lost amidst their cross-country moves.

Everything changes when Hannah encounters a scruffy, pudgy version of her husband - a man who claims to have come from a dimension where Hannah was murdered eight years ago, along with her college roommate. When Hannah accepts his offer to return to his dimension and visit her ailing mother, only too late does she recognize that this other Nathan is not the same man as her beloved husband: his obsessive quest to find Hannah alive again has been at any cost, including the security of the United States. Her disgust at his espionage is tempered by the realization that recent terrorist attacks have occurred in her world, not his, pointing to only a select few as suspects - her morally-deficient college roommate, Daphne, and Jimmy Chow, the man who murdered them both. As Hannah and Nathan are thrown into an uneasy alliance, she must confront the knowledge that her insignificant life has had an irrevocable impact on both their worlds.

The Locked Door resembles It's a Wonderful Life with a military wife discovering her true meaning to her family and the world.

Mouse
Literary Fiction
115,000 words

Fifteen-year old Lynn Bayani struggles simply to exist. Each school day she flees from the Red Bones, a neighborhood gang who terrorize her and commit unmentionable atrocities. Home offers no respite, only drudgery in the family's restaurant under the dominion of an unloving Filipina mother. Lynn's only solace is in the companionship of five animals who were once human, each changed at a moment of personal crisis and given a second chance at life and redemption. Lynn is the only one who can hear their voices, and the animals are the only ones who can keep Lynn alive against the escalating threat of the Red Bones. As her life begins to unravel, so do the secrets of her family, of the human lives of the animals, and ultimately, of the abuses inflicted on Lynn that threaten to shatter her utterly. Together, the girl and her menagerie struggle not merely to survive, but to reclaim their fading humanity before all is lost.