Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

Two major things occurred this week.

I delivered my printed and bound thesis to the university to complete my Phd. It is a week shy of a year from when I submitted it. Honestly, the longest 12 months ever due to the administration at the university. Anyway, I hope to graduate in April in person but I’m likely to have my degree conferred before then. This now means I can start work on developing my Phd novel, Sihem, for publication, actually to submit to agents first up. I have structural edits to take up. You might ask why do I need to do that. Didn’t I just do a PhD in creative writing? Yes, I did but I was limited to word length and also I explored themes related to my PhD topic and that restricted how much time I devoted to other aspects of world building. That’s my January sorted.

The second big bit of news is Awakening has been published to most e retailers. I’m about to hit print on the print version too. I haven’t updated my links yet. There’s a lot going on as we finish off renovations and painting and pay attention to family visiting in the lead up to Christmas.

I wanted to share with you a bit about the genesis of Awakenings. It started with a kind of a poem as I sat by my mother in the early morning in the later stages of her life. She didn’t die that time but it was close. So I sat there at 2 am watching her on April 19 2014, looking at her pale white skin, her shallow breaths and then wrote down the ideas that came to me. Here is what I wrote:

Bring out the soldiers who lie within their frozen crypts

Do not wake them or disturb them

Their time is done

They gave us this peace, t his life and we are thankful.

Let not their sleeping, tranquil faces beguile you

They are bringers of death, purveyors of harm

It is time to let them go

Let them burn

Their flesh to no more rise

Let us grasp a future where they no longer exist

Where we are free

I don’t claim to be a poet, but these words were the genesis behind Awakening. I used some of these words and the ideas behind them for the novel. Here is the blurb.

Bring out the cold soldiers who lie in frozen sleep.

Do not wake them nor let their tranquil faces beguile.

They are purveyors of death.

They must burn!

What soldiers?  Colony Five has been proudly peaceful since before living memory. 

The cryptic new orders make no sense to Deleen Milo… until she sees the burning bodies in the stasis sarcophagi.  She tries to uncover the truth behind the mysterious soldiers, only to become adrift in a colony suddenly full of secrets and threats.  Who wants the soldiers destroyed and the colony defenceless?

Pursued into hiding, Deleen manages to revive Rik Chesson, a Cold Soldier trying to understand the new world waiting for him after 134 years of cryosleep.  Deleen has never trusted easily, and Rik’s nanotech-infused posthuman form sets her nerves on edge.  But they are the only ones who can rescue the surviving Cold Soldiers and defend the colony against a deadly new threat.  They have to work together, and as they begin to truly know one another Deleen realises that however Rik’s body may have changed, the man inside might just be one she can love…

It has taken a while to get this book published. I started out thinking it would one thing but Nicole Murphy who was my first reader suggested I take a different tack. Every time I was part way through a revision something else would crop up and some of those revisions were big. This year, I had another beta reader, Lily, who did an amazing job and her comments helped me focus on getting it done and out there. I hope you like it.