#86 SJ Mayeski
WRITING:
My main book for this moon launch, Unbreakable, is actually a novelette, written originally for Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi (The Future Chronicles Book 14). I’m continuing this story (look for it in 2025), and also creating the huge back story behind the characters, location, and the many, many questions I ask and do not (yet) answer in the space of these nearly 10,000 words. (Publisher Sam Peralta has also bought space on board the ship, and has included each and every one of his Future Chronicles Anthologies and in doing so has honored the hundreds of us who wrote stories for these most excellent books.)
I also included an ongoing story, still in progress, currently titled “Moon Go”. A very intelligent woman, with special reasoning abilities, steps into a different and possibly deadly mystery; this is only the very beginnings of book 1 of a planned trilogy. Set in the near future, a focus is on climate change and its effects on the world, as well as a look on the likely next steps of humans into space, and where those two dynamic forces may meet: in space, of course! I introduce several characters, identify that something big and currently hidden will involve them, and suggest the possibility of a different kind of involvement between them as well. “Moon Go” will be out in 2024, along with a companion trilogy on the politics and science of climate change in 2040, currently titled the “Rising Tides” trilogy.
EDITING & PUBLISHING:
Besides writing books, I edit and publish them. I sent 3 books to the Moon that I have had the pleasure of editing and publishing.
The Seafarers is a Viking novel set in 880 CE. This book had been written and sold quite a few years previously, only to be returned to the author when a new senior editor took over her book, on a dispute of “more work needs to be done.” A battle ensued, and this book sat on her desk for a decade, when I happened to meet her on a visit to Ohio. There was much more work for me to do than I had expected, partly because of formatting that did not work correctly as the Word version in which it had been written was quite old. Dealing with that alone was challenging, cover art was another problem, and there were licensing worries. But it all worked out.
My Rock from Stoneman is a memoir with a focus on the author’s family, especially her husband who served during the Korean Conflict in the A-bomb testing program in Nevada, and died nearly 50 years later from that service. This family story includes the escapades of four daughters, and the good days and bad days with in-laws and grandparents. It is also steeped fairly heavily in the urban/suburban racism of the 1950s-1960s and the fight against it. The effects of A-bombing testing on very different kinds of people, the social changes that ran through the seventies, eighties, and beyond, and the importance of education for both children and adults are all examined. Well worth the read.
Once Upon a Different Time is a “memoir” of a young woman, ages 3 – 18, told in a mostly-true, with embellishment, style of her life in the years surrounding the Second World War in New York City. Join Annie as she gets a lesson on sex in the Metropolitan Museum, plays her first — and last — game of football; campaigns for FDR. Watch her challenge the dominance of the boys on the block; feel with Annie as she is numbed by the death of a classmate, stirred by romantic possibilities, and finally determined to forge a new path for herself.
PHOTOS/OTHER WRITING:
I added several family photos and copies of some very old work folks might find interesting. At an early age, it appeared that I might very well choose journalism as a career. I was editor of my high school newspaper, and managed to get myself suspended for a mostly anti-war (this was 1969) editorial I “forgot” to submit for approval – my bad (it would not have passed my faculty advisor and I really wanted to print it!) So when I began college at the University of San Francisco, which had a rich tradition of scoundrels writing for the school paper The Foghorn, I signed right up and somehow managed to get the big-story, above-the-fold article on my 2nd or 3rd assignment, on a racial protest action. I got so interested in that and other break-out protest movements of the time (the Seventies) that I stopped writing about it and started doing it. With some other like-minded citizens, I ran for student government office and when we mostly won we shut the school down for 3 days in protest of the war and the Kent State killings. My journalism career: up in smoke. Probably for the best, although I did some freelance work in San Diego when I moved back.
In other photos, left to right and top to bottom: my dad outside his deli in San Diego about the time I was born, my lovely mother’s engagement photo, a college paper cover that changed my career (not sure for the better), the first Cliff House menu when we opened in 1973, my Cliff House office circa 1985, my Bay to Breakers finish photo in 1986 (I survived being red-shirted), my siblings and me in 1997, the Polish village with the impossible name where my mom’s ancestors lived, and that my sister and I visited in 1999.
THANKS FOR READING!
Find SJ Mayeski’s stories here