Flipping Static is a YA contemporary fantasy novel with elements of psychological drama. It resonates with readers who like realism with a surreal twist, hidden gems (art, music, film), 2000s nostalgia, gamer culture, clues hidden in plain sight, and raw, philosophical conversations.

The book is currently in the editing stage and with beta readers. I can't wait to share it when it's ready!

Flipping Static is my debut novel, so I started with the basics of plotting my hero's journey on notecards and covering my floor with sticky notes. Initially, I wrote a full 80k zero draft the summer after I graduated high school, which I completely threw out. It was based too much on real life, which made the story simultaneously boring and unbelievable.

I started again from scratch and spent the next seven years (on and off) plotting, writing, researching, and editing my new story, cycling through those stages again and again. I knew the beginning and the ending early on and discovery-wrote the middle.

I have three new books in the plotting stage. I once again know the beginnings and endings, but haven't fleshed out the middles. It's important for me to know where I'm starting and where the characters will end up in order for the story to fall into place.

I put pieces of myself into all of the characters in Flipping Static. My protagonist, Silvia, is most obviously like me as she is an 18-year-old American girl going to high school in Estonia. She shares my love of art, fascination with dreams, and my OCD. But unlike me (hopefully) she is very impulsive, which allows me to write about her getting into lots of trouble. Silvia doesn't care about school, so in that regard, I was more like Josephine who is an academic perfectionist. I also see myself in Misha and wrote my experiences with depression into his character. All of my characters are a meld of people I know, celebrities, and book characters, scrambled together to make completely new characters.

One day in March 2019, I decided to go to the Tallinn Old Town viewpoints after school. I was able to capture the snow-covered city in golden hour light just before the sun set.

For the backgrounds of the front and back covers, I created paintings with pouring paint. I filled a paper cup with layers of blue, black, and white acrylic paint (the Estonian colors), adding silicon drops to form cell-like patterns. Then I poured the cup out onto a canvas, tilting the canvas until the paint covered its entire surface. Every time I repeated the process, I would get completely different patterns, so the result was always a complete surprise.

I chose pouring paint because my protagonist, Silvia, is a painter and it reminded me of thoughts bleeding into each other. The pouring paint alludes to fantasy, while the photograph of the buildings represents realism, communicating my genre of contemporary fantasy.

I took the photo of the butterfly at Mariposario del Drago Butterfly Park, in Tenerife, Spain. The Menelaus blue morpho I photographed had ragged, torn wings that I think perfectly balances beauty and horror as it melds into the pouring paint on the back cover. The blue butterfly is a prominent symbol in my novel, representing both dreams and OCD.

To create the spine, I took a photo of an old TV I borrowed that still produced static. I may or may not have stared at it hypnotized for a few days.

I created the entire cover myself, without the use of any generative AI. I combined all the pieces in Photoshop. It was very important for me to personally create and photograph all the elements as I am not just an author, but I am also a visual artist.

The playlist consists of songs that are referenced in my novel. There are songs that represent the different places I've lived such as "In Bloom" by Nirvana, which evokes memories of growing up in Seattle, and "Розовое вино" by Eldzhey & FEDUK, which was played at every house party when I was in high school in Tallinn. There are many shoegaze songs, as they feel like a musical representation of telepathy—hushed voices, walls of sound, and the sense of a push and pull between connection and a lack of connection. I think of the song "Deep In Yr Mind" by James Wyatt Crosby as my novel's theme song as it highlights the intimacy and longing associated with telepathy. The lyric I think connects most to my novel is found in Elliott Smith's "Tomorrow Tomorrow"—"I got static in my head/The reflected sound of everything." To me, he perfectly describes how it feels when the characters are drowning in a lack of connection and can't escape the static noise of the minds around them.