Ava Morgyn's Blog, page 4

Resurrection Girls Cover Reveal + New Website

Books take a long time to birth. To give you somewhat of an idea of the buildup to this moment, I began writing Resurrection Girls at the start of 2015. I sold Resurrection Girls in June 2017. Today, in April of 2019, I can finally reveal the cover to you. And in October of this year, the book itself. And to think, I used to believe I wasn't good at commitment. I'm pretty sure my journey as a fiction writer coupled with my marriage of 21 years have blown that theory out of the water. When my publisher first began talking about cover design, I was so curious what they were envisioning. Even though I wrote this novel and love every facet of it, I could never picture a cover for it. I just had no idea how to represent Resurrection Girls in a single image. It felt too complex a task. But as I began to get inklings of the direction they were taking, my enthusiasm grew. I adore this cover. It says so much about the novel without revealing more than it should. Illustrated covers are typically my favorites. And this artist has such a unique, dark-storybook vibe which resonates perfectly with my characters and their experiences. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that nearly everything you see in the cover image is pulled directly from the novel's symbolism. I hope you love the cover for Resurrection Girls as much as I do. More importantly, when October rolls around, I hope you read and love the story as much as I do. Like a new mother, I am so proud of this work and where it's going to go in the world. (Did I mention my fiction work was dark? I feel like you get it, looking at this cover.) Please feel free to share this cover image if you love it too! Click here to add it to your Goodreads. Click here to preorder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, or Books a Million. Click here to go to my Books page and read more about Resurrection Girls. And finally, click here to subscribe to my newsletter so you don't miss a single thing coming up about Resurrection girls and Ava Morgyn. This has been a BIG week of reveals for me. In addition to being able to give you my new cover today, I revealed my newly designed website yesterday. Both of which hold very special places in my heart. I hope you take a moment to visit my website and learn a bit about me and my work. And keep checking back! There is more big news on the horizon for Resurrection Girls and Ava Morgyn. I'll be posting more frequently now that the site is finished and we are gearing up to the release. Big love, Ava

Preventing a Tragedy like the Foster's

In Resurrection Girls, main character, Olivia, is grappling with a family deeply paralyzed by their grief several years after the accidental drowning of her three-year-old baby brother. Robby's tragic loss mirrors the stories I heard or read growing up. Stories about kids who toddled into backyard pools, slipped under the bathwater, or found their way to ponds, lakes, or nearby rivers. My own tragic tale of child loss, the death of my beautiful daughter, Evelyn, does not come with so obvious a cause to point to. I cannot fill in the backyard pool as Olivia's father does in the story, or shake my fist at the unforgiving ocean. I cannot teach safety skills to other parents in hopes of preventing another needless death like Ev's. Because we still don't know or understand what took Evelyn's life. But as the author of this book, a book that features the aftermath of a childhood drowning, I can raise awareness of drowning prevention, water safety, and organizations like Live Like Jake Foundation, who work and fundraise tirelessly to support families who have suffered a drowning accident and prevent others from joining their ranks. Several months ago, I spoke at length with Stacy Van-Santen, a director at Live Like Jake Foundation. We bonded over the senselessness of child loss and the struggle for families to carry on in the wake of tragedy. We covered many topics like drowning statistics — drowning is a leading cause of death in children ages 1 through 4, 86% of parents are not taught drowning prevention measures or water safety skills by their pediatrician (or even have it brought up to be discussed at their child's appointments), and more than 77% of drownings in children under five occur in under five minutes — and the controversy over ISR, or Infant Swimming Resource, self-rescue survival swimming techniques taught to children between the ages of 6 months and 6 years. We talked about the mission of the Live Like Jake Foundation — awareness, education, self-rescue lessons, and scholarships for families with a child who experiences a near-drowning, or submersion incident, and often have lingering healthcare costs as a result. And we circled back again and again to one resounding point — how families view a tragedy like accidental drowning as something that will never happen to them, making awareness and education that much harder to drive home. There is a distancing technique that happens among the unbereaved. I've witnessed it several times myself since losing our daughter and can remember the experience vividly in my life before. It is the quiet but unrelenting belief that that other mother, that other family, is somehow not like yours, somehow deficient, somehow less than. They missed the signs you would never. They failed where you would succeed. It's harder to convince yourself of with a death like Evelyn's because we have so little to go on. Her loss cannot be chalked up to a lack of parental supervision or bad judgment. But when it comes to something like drowning, it's easy for parents to think they can and will watch their kids close enough that they don't have to worry. And that's simply not true. Ask any mother, and she will have a story to tell about her child slipping away, about that time they let themselves out the back gate or scribbled on the freshly-painted walls or ate an entire plate of brownies, all while she was right there watching. In a matter of minutes, or even seconds, kids can find trouble. Most of the time its benign. But it only takes one opportunity for it to be dangerous, damaging, even fatal. Stacy and I both want to stress the importance of educating yourself on drowning prevention. Live Like Jake Foundation proposes a four-pronged approach: fences, locks, alarms, and lessons. It's not as easy as choosing not to have a pool installed at home. Young children can drown in less than two inches of water, making everything from the bathroom toilet to a backyard fountain a risk. And in any given year, you may visit multiple places that house a pool or other water feature, or are near a natural body of water. If you're a parent of small children, please take a minute to visit the Live Like Jake Foundation website or speak to your pediatrician about drowning prevention. If you're a sibling of small children, you can absolutely advocate for their safety by sharing this information with your parents. For more information on childhood drowning and how you can help, visit livelikejake.com.

Toxic Friends

The first time someone described the relationship between my main characters in Resurrection Girls as "toxic", it took me aback. I'm not sure why. One of my big inspirations for the relationship between Olivia and Kara in the novel was Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye — a devastatingly beautiful novel about a toxic friendship during a girl's formative years and how it haunts her still as an adult when she returns to her home town for an art show honoring her work. But while Kara is forceful and overwhelming as a character, she has a purpose. It takes Kara's suck-all-the-air-out-of-the-room presence to jolt Olivia from the catatonic hold of her grief. It takes someone larger than life to breathe life into Olivia again. Officially, the word finally chosen to represent this unusual relationship in the Publisher's Weekly announcement was "obsessive", which I think is much more accurate. The relationship between Olivia and Kara is off-center. It's heavy like a lead blanket, thick like the steam of a sauna, rich like dark chocolate. It's heady and intoxicating. It's all a bit much. And while that is maybe not ideal for the average adolescent girl, it's exactly what Olivia needs. And it's perfect for novel writing. I borrowed from the pages of my own life for aspects of this novel. Olivia's experience of grief was deeply reflective of my own. Of course, that was before losing Evelyn. That was when I thought the most tragic loss in my life was my mother. But I borrowed from my early friendship experiences as well. These kinds of hyper-bonded, B.F.F., out-of-balance dynamics were not uncommon for me. Drawing close to one friend at the exclusion of others. Possessive and pushy power struggles. I tended to moor myself to a stronger, more dominant female personality until I felt suffocated and would retreat from the relationship gasping for air. It might be within reason to label them as "toxic" if we had been adults, but we were girls. We were too young to model perfect relationship dynamics at all times. The typical dramas would play out, squabbles would ensue, break ups and make ups, and then we'd be painting each other's nails or cutting our Barbie's hair again as if none of it went down. I think this is the pattern for many girl friendships early on. There's often an alpha female and a subordinate. I was most often the latter, occasionally the former. I'm grateful that as an adult I've learned a lot by studying my early childhood relationship patterns. I've managed to steer clear of so many of the "toxic" friend pitfalls that one reads about online or in novels like mine. I've had a couple of friendships go belly up since adulting, but I wouldn't label them toxic. I wouldn't rush to make the other person wrong or cast a villain. I think they can be relegated to far-less dramatic and novel-worthy misunderstandings or basic growing apart. But I'll give you a secret I learned years ago that has helped me define which relationships are worth my investment. There are three fundamental things I need in any relationship for it to work. I'd argue they are three things anyone needs. And they form the foundation of trust that I build my friendships upon. 1. I need to feel safe. 2. I need to feel valued. 3. I need to feel heard. That's it. Everything else is the fluff on top. In every relationship of mine — be it friend, family, or romance — that has failed, I can look back and see where one of these went missing, or was never there in the first place. I wish I'd had these trusty criteria in high school or even earlier. But I managed, with a few emotional scrapes and bruises to show for it. And I still have friends from that period in my life. Women I trust, appreciate, and value. We've weathered some storms together, and we're still standing at one another's side. I'm grateful for all my friends. The ones who remain, and the ones who don't. They've all taught me something. No one in your life is an accident. And I don't really believe in mistakes. Everything is an opportunity. A lesson. A catalyst for growth. You don't have to like it, but it doesn't make it less true. It will never be okay to me that my daughter died. But even that experience holds wisdom I can't deny. I am curious and anxious to see how the world at large receives Olivia and Kara's friendship. Will they rush to judge Kara? Will they pigeon-hole her as antagonist? Will they see her virtues like Olivia does? Will they scream at Olivia between pages, "What the hell are you doing?" Will they scratch their heads? Shake them? Sigh? I hope the reactions to Olivia and Kara are as varied and rich as their layers. No one is black and white. Not in my world, not in my novels. I like complexity, diversity, humanity. I like seeing it reflected in the stories I read, and even more, the stories I write.

Our Story

If you're going to read my novels, if you're going understand me as a writer, as a mother, as a person, then you should know my story. Because this story now colors everything I do. It informs every word I write. I wrote Resurrection Girls prior to this, which is almost unbelievable to me now. It was the prelude to my own terrible story of devastating loss. But I edited the novel over this last year, in the months of my deep, early grief — a painful process to be sure. So it, too, has been touched by my truth, both before and after losing Evelyn. OUR STORY In The Before, we were a happy family of five—myself, my husband, our oldest daughter who had just turned 20, Evelyn who was only weeks away from going away to college, and our son who had finished his first year of high school. The Before is what I call the life we had prior to Evelyn's passing. It was fraught with its own challenges, but if we had anything going in our favor, it was each other. It was that as a family, we excelled. Click here to read the rest of my personal story of love and loss.