Today we welcome Stanislava Buevich to the page. Welcome!
1.Tell me a little bit about the character of this book
Moon is a 13-year-old girl who lives in Oxford with her single mother. Moon is brilliant and mature. She has to be because her mother is a bit ‘kooky’. Moon’s mum doesn’t believe in traditional medicine; she is very spiritual; she has what she calls ‘the eye’, which is kind of like really acute intuition. That might be true, but unfortunately, her avoiding antibiotics at all costs ends up bringing Moon to Clearlake - a strange hospital located on a remote island off the Scottish coast. Moon loves her mother more than anything, and she accepts her eccentricities. However, she now finds herself in a bit of a pickle because she is trapped in a very spooky place where children regularly disappear, never to be seen again. She makes new friends along the way and grows into a confident and independent young woman during the course of the book.
2. Do you believe in the paranormal, and if so, do you have an experience you can share?
Well, I do believe in the paranormal. The only thing is that I think we call it paranormal because our current level of science is insufficient to explain it. I also firmly believe that everything has a scientific explanation, and one day, all of the phenomena we call ‘paranormal’ will be explained. I have never experienced anything myself, but I know many people who have, and I completely trust they didn’t imagine it. In fact, one of the minor episodes in Clearlake depicts a woman who talks to the spirits. She describes an incident where she was on a train. At the exact moment when she went through the tunnel, someone unseen began to strangle her. The grip released, as soon as the train exited the tunnel. This exact thing happened to a friend of mine, and it continued to happen for as long as she’d taken this train and went through that particular tunnel. I often (always) borrow from real life - things I experience, read, and hear for my books, and that moment is no exception.
3. What titles are you working on now that you can tell us about?
I like to work on a few things simultaneously and in different genres. It really helps me prevent a complete writer’s block. I am editing a mystery sci-fi adventure for teens/YA audience called The Soultrapper. I am very much hoping to release it before the summer. I am querying agents for my first book for adults, which is an absurdist political speculative fiction (think Dr. Strangelove), and I am finishing up writing a thriller set in the South of France, and working on outlining the first book in a detective series. I also have a few gothic/fantasy ideas I want to get to as soon as possible.
Excerpt
There will come a time when you wonder, how did a girl like me end up in a place like Clearlake and mortal danger? Well, it all started with a terrible cold. At first, it was just a blocked nose. Then a sore throat, nothing major. About a week later, I got a temperature. And the blocked nose got worse. Much worse. I lost all sense of smell and the ability to breathe. Snot kept trickling down from my nostril to my top lip, and I had to persistently wipe it off with my sleeve or taste the said snot. I had a headache. A constant, nagging, relentless headache as if a woodpecker was incessantly pecking above the bridge of my nose.
I was thirteen at the time and missed so many days of school that my mother got fined by the government. Now, I know what you’re thinking - any responsible parent would have taken their offspring to a GP if the wretched illness hadn’t gone away within a week. Well, not my mother.
My mother didn’t trust Western Medicine, you see, particularly vaccines and antibiotics. As far as she was concerned, those two were the source of all evil. I count myself incredibly lucky that, so far, I have managed to avoid catching something particularly nasty like Rubella, Mumps, or Measles. I’ve never had anything more severe than a cold, in fact. And while most colds went away without intervention, other than a honey, lemon and gin concoction (which was surprisingly effective, never mind that I was far too young to take it), this cold proved to be something else entirely.
About a week in, my mother marched into my room early in the morning. Loud, insistent stomps woke me up from a hazy, feverish dream. She touched my forehead with the tips of her fingers and raised her eyebrow, nodding as if everything was going according to plan.
“Well, I think I know what will finally do the trick,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. Well, not actually. Not on the outside. The outside she could see. I rolled my eyes on the inside, imagining them going so far inside their sockets that all that was left were the white bits.
“Beetroot!” she exclaimed, her voice chiming like a Christmas bell.
“Beetroot?” I yawned, and a few tears seeped out of the corners of my eyes. I wasn’t sure if the yawn caused it or the ever-escalating feeling of utter desperation.
“A few drops of beetroot juice inside your nose three times a day, and you will be good as new. I promise.”
She made similar promises a lot.
“If you stick a clove of garlic in each nostril overnight, in the morning… Poof. Cured. Gone. I promise.”
“Breathing over a pot with hot potatoes and a duvet over your head will open up the sinuses and unleash the phlegm. All of the gunk will stream out. You’ll see. I promise.”
“If you do a wee in a little pot and then take some of that wee with a little pipette that I’ve got here for you and…”
“NO!”
I drew the line at urotherapy, as it was apparently called, and it did take quite a bit of courage to stand up to my mother. She fussed and fretted but couldn’t get me to administer urine into my nose.
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