[image error]Hi! You found your way over to Austin Aslan during the Fall 2019 YA Scavenger Hunt! Congratulations. You probably arrived here via C.M. Boers. Awesome. (And my Team Blue #YASH host is Heather McKenzie. Check it out!) If you happen to not know what the heck I’m talking about, Go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page to find out all about the hunt. And if you’re experiencing any technical glitches, don’t worry, Glitch Happens. Go here for some tasty medicine.

Now, without further ado…let’s YASH!

144 (ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR)

AND NOW NOW, without further ado-do, here’s the  MAIN EVENT! I’M HOSTING Lori M. Lee!

Lori has provided me with the following awesome bonus material for this year’s YA Scavenger Hunt. She’s featuring the opening page for her short story in COLOR OUTSIDE THE LINES. She’ll really excited for people to read it!

 

STARLIGHT AND MOONDUST Excerpt

According to the locals of Little Nova, a witch lived in their woods. They said she brewed potions, cursed trespassers, and grew her garden on the bones of sacrifices.

Hlee Khue knew better, though. Niam Tais wasn’t a witch; she was a shaman.

Every Wednesday and Friday, Hlee took the trail that wound through the woods north of town. The trail eventually led to a small house guarded by lawn sculptures and a brood of chickens, where Hlee delivered a hearty dinner prepared by her mom, with plenty left over for the next day’s lunch. It was the duty of the tiny Hmong community in Little Nova to look out for Niam Tais, as the woman lived alone with no children to care for her.

Niam Tais had lost her father and brother in the war and then her mother to sickness in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The history of tragedy and frantic escape were the shared stories of all refugees. But how Niam Tais came to be here, in Little Nova, was a different kind of story entirely.

When Niam Tais was a young girl, she’d woken from her bed, driven from the sweat-damp sheets by the humidity and the bright face of the moon through the window of her family’s hut. She’d wandered down to the riverbank and fallen asleep at its shore to the gentle shushing of the water. The next morning, she brushed moondust from the creases of her clothes as her thoughts grasped for the vestiges of a dream about a man in shining robes and a string of white stones against his brow.

It was a sign, the village elder decided, that she’d been called by the spirits to the revered duties of a shaman.

Some years later, after the war had displaced her halfway around the world, she fell asleep with the moonlight full against the backs of her eyelids and dreamed again of the Moon Emperor. In the dream, he shot an arrow across the night sky, a streak of brilliant silver, and beckoned her to retrieve it. As in her childhood, she’d obeyed the calling and ended up in the sleepy town of Little Nova.

What Niam Tais did after that wasn’t clear, and Hlee had never been satisfied by the open ending. Instead, she couldn’t help but wonder if the story hadn’t yet found its conclusion.

 

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Exciting stuff, Lori! All right, fearless hunter, off you go… But before you scurry off to visit the next author on the hunt, Tera Lynn Childs, please feel free to peek around my entire site for a while and follow the links to my two YA survival-disaster sci fi novels, THE ISLANDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD and THE GIRL AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, and my new TURBO RACER series with HarperCollins, TURBO Racers: Trailblazer. Book Two: Escape Velocity, drops in Feb of 2020.

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MOVE ALONG FOLKS, YOU’VE ONLY GOT A FEW DAYS TO GET THROUGH THIS!

Please continue your delectable YA Scavenger Hunt by visiting the next lovely author: Tera Lynn Childs Go! Do it! DO IT NOW!!!