Book review

The Mars Awakens Short Story Challenge!

/ HM Waugh / 1 Comment

Mars Awakens is out in Australian stores on May 3rd, and I am well on my way to finishing the second book in the duology! (Yay me!) So it’s time for a story challenge.

But first, some background … There are a lot of connections to the Martian moons, Deimos and Phobos, in the books (Dee, one of the main characters, is named after Deimos). And they’re pretty interesting moons. Much smaller than our own, not very round at all. Phobos is really close to Mars and orbits it four times every sol! Whereas Deimos is so small and far away that it’s more like a big star.

There have been a few attempts to send missions to the Martian moons, but either they’ve failed on the way or the idea hasn’t even got off the ground. I love being inspired by real science to think up weird and wonderful ideas. So it’s makes me imagine – What if there was something on the moons stopping us from getting there? Wouldn’t that be cool?

So here’s the challenge:

  1. Write a short story that has something to do with the Martian moons or draws inspiration from them. I don’t really mind about the length :), I’m more about the story idea and your world-building.
  2. Email your story to me (hmwaughwriter at gmail dot com) or have someone tag my instagram or facebook account with a post of your story.

I will choose the best story to have a character from the second book named after the writer!

Stories due to me by 31st May 2022, kids only 9 – 14 years 🙂

The fact behind the fiction – why sometimes your backup plans need their own backup plans

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Three weeks to go until Evacuation Road comes out! I’m so excited, and I’m loving how many early reviewers are really connecting with Eva and her story!

This week I’ll be looking at one of the important foundations for the book. Resilience. Getting back up when you’ve been knocked down. Making new plans when your original plans die a terrible death. And then devising even more cunning plans when your back up plans fail as well.

And, sometimes, throwing all your plans in the proverbial bin and coming up with a entirely new aim that at least gets you out of there.

I did a lot of this sort of thing as I travelled around South America, and one of the best (and most enjoyable) examples involved a train called Death, somewhat monotonous food, and a few phantom buses. It was my first blockade (of many) and it went like this …

Firstly, follow your dreams. Always. No matter how hard.

And a dream I had? One that had grown and flourished for years? It was to take the so-called Death Train, which ran from Quijarro in the very east of Bolivia to Santa Cruz, kind of in the middle. It could take anything from sixteen hours to days and days, apparently. Traversing amazing countryside. I really wanted to experience it.

(And that wasn’t a death wish or anything. It wasn’t the Death Train because it was super dangerous to ride in. More because either lots of workers died laying the line, or because it had once been used to transport people sick with Yellow Fever and/or the bodies of those that died in the outbreak.)

Anyway I planned it out and I got there. Quijarro. Nice and early in the morning on a Friday. Went straight to the train station. Butterflies in the stomach. This was it.

Except it wasn’t.

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