The Comicality of Chance

Hartley Mae Jones is an avid comic book fanatic and self-proclaimed geek girl living in a small town in coastal Massachusetts. She goes to a cyber high school and lives at home with her two moms and cat, living as normal a life as one can live in those slightly unusual circumstances. She's fairly secure in knowing who she is and what she believes until she meets Devin Sanders and her life and perception of herself is forever changed. That's the funny thing about chance: it flips up and turns around all that you knew to be true. Our plans and chance often taper off in different directions, but for Hartley Mae Jones, they've intertwined by happenstance. When she meets Devin, everything she's ever known is put into question, but that's just the beginning. Hartley and Devin spend the summer bonding over video games, comic books, and firefly captures, but also are searching for something they both hadn't known they'd been missing and end up finding it in the most unexpected of places: in each other. Along the way, Hartley discovers her true self and realizes that she really does have a say in her own happiness, contrary to what she used to think. Our protagonist is Hartley Mae Jones. She is seventeen years old and whiles the days away by reading comics and finding ways to try and blame herself for aspects of her somewhat turbulent past. Devin Marshall Sanders lives alone nearby, studying, working, and living a quiet life. They sleep under the same sky. They live in the same town. They read all the same books. And by chance, they find themselves in one another. The two cross paths at a comic book event and soon forget what life was like before they'd met. The Comicality of Chance is my most recent written work. It is a 36,000-word contemporary young adult novel encompassing certain elements of a bildungsroman. It also deals with themes in romance, sexuality, self-discovery, anxiety, the teenage experience, and what it truly means to be honest to yourself.