Seeds of Change (Aride Universe, Book 1) by Willow Thomson

Release date: February 12, 2019

Subgenre: Space Colonisation

About Seeds of Change:

 

Jey is an introverted, intuitive healer with nothing left to lose. All her healing skill couldn’t save her mother from a virulent manmade virus. The heat index of 2071 Earth has reached crippling levels. Jey is barely coping—until she stumbles upon an opportunity to join the crew of Two by Two, the first colony ship set to launch from the ailing Earth.

The mission—to create an idealistic artisan colony on an unexplored exoplanet—fits right in with Jey’s dreams. Her friendship with a clairvoyant child onboard the ship, her growing empathic abilities, and her bumbling attempts at love bring her hope.

But when a rival corporation sabotages the ship, and their target planet is a blasted wasteland, Jey finds herself at the center of the conflict.

Can she set aside her old self destructive patterns? Can she take a leap into a new way of being—and seeing to save her colony? Join Jey and her shipmates on the journey to Aride to find out.

Seeds of Change is a soft science fiction novel with a splash of metaphysics and magic. It is a coming of age story with big themes, small pleasures, and an ensemble cast of characters living in a world you won’t want to leave.

 

Except:

 

CHAPTER ONE

The Big is Too Sad

Once again, Jey had crawled into bed with a guy she didn’t like much. She had slipped out of his apartment while night passed softly into morning and he was just a dark lump in the bed.

As she walked the silent streets of the townhouse development, the moon floated, pearly white, in the early morning sky. It looked cool, like a frosty ice cube, while she felt puffy from the heat, sweat collecting under her breasts, soaking her tank top. At least she could sweat. It was when the sweat wouldn’t come that you were done for. She had seen it happen in Arizona and she didn’t ever want to see it again. People suffocated by the heat of their own bodies. 

Don’t think about it.

She walked the ten blocks home, trying not to keep a tally of the families in each townhouse who had lost someone. She especially tried not to think about the emptiness in her own house, where her mother should have been. 

Jey stepped into the coolness of the townhouse at 15 Primrose and started to tiptoe up the stairs to her childhood bedroom before she remembered. Her mind still couldn’t reach all the way around the gaping absence of her mother from the world. She didn’t need to tiptoe. Her mother wasn’t lying in her bedroom fast asleep. Her mother was gone—three months gone. Her mother who had made this community into the sustainable island that it was. Her mother who had pestered everyone in the community until they chipped in for solar panels and a windmill just to shut her up. But it was all for nothing. Solar panels and a windmill couldn’t stop the man-made virus that killed her mother, gram, and half the community—and they couldn’t stop the heat index from rising. 

Jey climbed into her childhood bed and pulled the covers over her head. She had two hours before she had to pull herself together to be the gifted healer everyone expected her to be. 

When she got up after two hours of restless half-sleep, she stopped at her dresser as she had every morning for two weeks, and picked up the ad torn out of the Merchandiser. The Merchandiser had survived, like a cockroach, even though the town newspaper had shut down two years before. She held the ad up to the morning light and read it one more time.

Can you brew beer? We want you.

Can you make cheese? We want you.

Can you farm, sew, nurse, doctor, raise children,
raise livestock, cook, create? We want you.

Are you fit, strong and healthy? We want you.

Join Two by Two at 461 Becker.

We ship out April 24, 2170.

A row of tiny spaceship icons bordered the ad. The paper was starting to fray and the words were faded from handling. Jey thought it had to be a scam. But there must have been a reason that she’d scanned the Merchandiser and torn out the ad instead of dumping the flyer in the compost bin like she always did. 

It wasn’t the first time that she’d done something without her conscious mind’s participation. It happened a lot. Ever since she was a kid, something had nudged her and led her that had nothing to do with logic.

 

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About Willow Thomson:

Willow Thomson lives among the rolling hills and tall trees of a small hamlet with her husband of many years and children who come and go. While spending a lifetime "finding" herself, only to discover that she was there all along, she has pursued several pastimes: typesetting, weaving, glass bead making, energy healing, homeopathy, and writing.

She loves a good morality tale about the struggle between the dark and the light. She trusts that at rock bottom most people are good but she suspects that some people are not. She is sure that life is more mysterious and magical than we know in these days of selfies, venti double shot lattes, and working overtime to make ends meet.

She always roots for the underdog and hangs on tightly to the belief that good will triumph over evil in the end and that some things are worth fighting for--nature, equality, common sense, beauty, and truth. And some things make life worth living--family, friends, trees, flowers, oceans, streams and lakes, French pastries, and fresh baked bread.

Willow writes stories to try to understand all these things and more.

 

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