Planned & In-Progress Books

This page tracks the major works set in the Ahmieverse that are currently planned, drafted, or in active revision. All titles and details are subject to change as the stories grow, but this gives you a sense of where things are headed and where particular characters first appear.

Uncle Lucius’ Letters (Zofia’s Story)

Status: In active development, likely to be the first finished
Type: Epistolary / hybrid novel, alternating between letters and present-day narrative.
Premise: Set primarily in 2016 Lakewood, Ohio, Uncle Lucius’ Letters follows Zofia Warren as she helps her mother prepare to move out of the ancestral home into a senior living apartment as disability needs emerge. While sorting the house, Zofia discovers a box of letters and journals from her long-deceased granduncle Lucius, written in the spirit of Seneca: thoughtful, direct, sometimes painfully honest. Their relationship on the page is based on a mash-up of my own great-uncles: the author Norvin Pallas (who taught me checkers and promised to teach me chess) and his younger brother Chuck (who put a camera in my hands when I could barely stand).
Structure: The book alternates between near-recent modern day (2016, with lightly fudged Lakewood venues) and scenes from Zofia’s childhood and young adulthood, as refracted through the letters and journals.
Key Themes: Sandwich-generation caregiving without a shared roof, family systems and emotional maturity, grief and legacy, chosen and inherited mentors, the "mommy track" career issues, the ways letters and journals can parent us across time.

JTTW (working title)

Status: In development.
Type: Contemporary fantasy road-trip novel for middle grades and up.
Premise: A Percy-Jackson–esque reimagining of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West as a family road trip from Cleveland to Silicon Valley. Eirene Sun and her five sons must cross the country to rescue the boys’ father from the clutches of the Demon Bull King, encountering gods, spirits, ghostly uncles, and spiritual bureaucracies along the way. The sons’ abilities and dynamics draw heavily on Chinese folklore about a group of superpowered brothers (there is an English version depicted in a picture book about ten Chinese brothers I read to my own children years ago, based on much older stories from China), overlaid onto fictionalized versions of my own five sons.
Key Themes: Intercultural family life, multigenerational households, Chinese and Chinese-American history, diasporic identity, disability and chronic illness on the road, family systems under mythic pressure, what it means to “rescue” someone from forces bigger than any one person.

Six Seeds (Persephone Retelling)

Status: In development (outlining and early drafting).
Type: Standalone mythic retelling set within the Ahmieverse, and it is also the only novel I will ever write that is NOT for family-time (it needs to contain sex and violence to be true to the character's development).
Premise: A retelling of the Persephone myth, grounded in trauma-informed storytelling and disability-aware realism, inspired in part by the public persona and music of Tori Amos. The story follows a survivor finding her way back to herself, her power, and her community without erasing the costs of what she has lived through.
Key Themes: Consent and coercion, underworlds as trauma states, mother–daughter bonds, rebuilding agency, spiritual reclamation.
Proceeds: A portion of proceeds from this work will be donated to RAINN (the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network).

Future & Untitled Projects

This section will collect future ideas and working titles as they become solid enough to describe. I actually have several others that I don't currently have time to include above, as well as some very fresh baby plot-bunnies Expect to see:

Additional mythic or folkloric retellings refracted through disability, trauma-informed practice, and Intersectional Stoicism.
Short stories that live primarily in online communities and digital spaces within the Ahmieverse.
Collaborative or co-created works emerging from other writers playing in this universe.

If you are working on a story set in the Ahmieverse and would like it noted here once it becomes public, feel free to let me know.