Going Home – A dystopian novella about family, memory and identity

Going Home is actually one of my absolute oldest ideas, dating back to when I was 14 (so about 2002). Back then it was supposed to be a YA novel series about a school for spies, which I thought up while reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. About half a dozen metamorphoses later it has changed genre, plot, world, themes, title and format. Really the only thing left of the original idea are the 3 main characters, who entered into the story a few years after it’s conception but are remarkably similar now to how they were then. It’s funny how things go.

Nowadays, it is a dystopian novella which deals with issues of identity, familial relationships and painful memories. It centers around Orryn, a woman who has spent more than half her life an ocean away from her original home and who has now chosen to return there to reunite with her sister. As they start to get to know each other a second time, it becomes apparent that their memories of the childhood they shared are very different and Orryn is caught between the urge to run from her past and the desire to stay in a place where she has started to feel at home.

I wrote the first draft of Going Home during Camp NaNoWriMo 2013, as well as doing the first round of revision then. At the time of writing this, a final round of revision will shortly begin, and the plan is to have it out on Amazon Kindle and on Smashwords before the summer 2014.