Elly would give anything to have her life resemble a Hallmark movie. She longs for her happily-ever-after: a proposal by her boyfriend, a big raise at the perfect job, and a fat inheritance from her great-aunt. Instead, she finds herself alone, broke, and sorting through a storage unit filled with worthless junk. But life can change in an instant. When Elly opens a decade-old envelope addressed to her, she discovers it contains an astonishing monetary gift. Elly's prospects soar. Then she learns she can't cash the long-expired check. What's more, she's never heard of her benefactor: a woman who claims the money is honoring a long-ago favor by Elly's grandmother. Hoping to alleviate her financial straits and find a connection to her long-deceased family, Elly embarks on a search for the mystery woman. Trouble is, she doesn't know if chasing this particular rainbow will result in a pot of gold--or yet another crushing disappointment. This was my entry for the Open Novella Contest. I made it through the first two rounds, but didn't finish to qualify for the final round. It's also the prequel to "The Marvels of Prairie Creek." :D

[Book 2 of the ARC10 Trilogy] Rampant addictions, psychotic breakdowns, and threats of mutiny keep Commander Janika Lorn up all night. Transporting two-thousand souls safely from a destroyed Earth to a new habitat aboard the refugee ship ARC10 has been a special kind of hell - especially while also hiding her illegal pregnancy from her commanding officer. She wonders if they should turn around and take their chances in the crumbling underground bunker city they abandoned, even with the hostile invading aliens still patrolling the sky. She wonders if they're capable of surviving the rest of the journey. Because it seems like her troubles couldn't get any worse, and they've only been in space for three months. As usual, Commander Janika Lorn is wrong. When she finally hits an all-time low in the confines of an alien prison, a botched rescue operation puts her life in the black-gloved hands of Captain Shin-Hyun Moon of the HMS Valediction - a notorious vagrant and patchwork monster who was stitched together with the eclectic skins of the galaxy. Despite being instant enemies, Lorn and Moon are forced to work together to salvage their separate missions that have gone totally awry. HMS Valediction is the sequel to 2017 Watty winner ARC10, the second installation of the ARC10 trilogy. Cover art by the enormously talented @FayLane

Luna is the Moonwarden, a chosen guardian of the moon. Her duty is to set it in the sky each night and gather it each morning. Cloistered away from those who would wish to use her for the moon's power, Luna is visited in her tower by a boy with the sun tied around his neck. This is my little entry to the #MidnightSunMovie contest so please give it some love!

"Death is the wish of some, the fear of many, and the end of all." With an emotional past, Aspin's trauma follows her, lurking in the shadows of her mind in the form of a monster. Faced with addiction and abuse, Aspin must learn to trust herself in order to grasp a hold of her reality- or let it be her demise. Follow Aspin's story as she uncovers truths, battles pain, and fights to keep herself sane in 'The Bane of Aspin'. 1st place winner in General Fiction of The Purple Apple Awards as of 07/07/2017 People's choice for the Rosey Red Awards as of 09/17/2018

[Book 1 of the ARC10 Trilogy] **Winner of the 2017 Watty Storysmith award** The President created an underground safe-haven for the survivors of the alien invasion. He built it to save them all from total annihilation. He protects them, feeds them, keeps them under his ever-watchful gaze so they can live. All he asks is that they obey. Captain Janika Lorn doesn't want to obey. Not if it means spreading her legs and contributing to the President's precious eugenics program. As a perfect candidate for the Human Hope Project, she is obligated by law to make more citizens for the dying society. But all she wants is her freedom to fight the Invaders and protect the people who already exist. If the mandated program wasn't bad enough, the worst part is trying to fulfill it with Captain Dean Freyer, her scientifically matched partner and best friend of sixteen years. Just as Captain Lorn is about to succumb to her fate, another opportunity arises. A mysterious commanding officer asks her to lead a human refugee ship--to save humanity by evacuating the destroyed Earth and shuttling the remaining population to a new habitable exoplanet 400 light years away. The mission is perilous. Especially because now, standing between her and her freedom is the hostile alien hosts of her ship, the ARC10, a sister returned from the dead, an array of impossibly confusing alien tech, a rekindled heat between her and Dean, and a sexy militia chief she can't seem to keep her hands off of. ARC10 is a romance-heavy sci-fi with the speculative horror of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the military action of Battle: Los Angeles. Cover art by @FayLane Copyright © 2016 by LL Montez