A local author is excited to develop a new kind of hero for her debut novel.
Stephanie Stachoski's first shot and feature-length fiction, and first in a planned series, is titled Terrestrial Advent. She said her inspiration for the story revolved around a woman whose life gets swept up by her circumstances and the decisions she makes.
"Like all of us, sometimes we don't know if the decision we're making is good or bad. We'll just hang on for the ride and see what happens," said Stachoski.
There are a lot of notions she wanted to play around with as she went through the story, particularly the idea of changing the past if given the opportunity.
"I imagined that if people eventually read my little story, which I never thought would get published, I wanted to take them out of their comfort zone and make them a little uncomfortable at times, and think about things from a different angle."
Stachoski also wanted to centre her story on a character type that she found highly absent from popular fiction.
"For me, I have to laugh a little bit, I kind of thumb my nose at a lot of the entertainment and literature that's out there that loves to make all of their heroes and heroines brand new, young people," she said. "What about the rest of us? We're still good. I made the main character a middle-aged woman, and she gets a second chance at things."
Stachoski said having her character get a second chance at parts of life with the knowledge she had gained was fun to play with.
"The notion I wanted to play devil's advocate with was that if you had the chance to start all over and keep all the memories that you already have, would you do it again? Would you start all over? Would you be young again? Not necessarily starting from childhood but young again, and you know everything you know now.
"Most people would leap at that chance, but she finds things aren't always as simple as we think. We're not always guaranteed that the knowledge we have now would serve in another life."
Stachoski added with a laugh that she's often questioned that. She calls her life a mixed adventure, in part because when she changes course, she said that what she had been doing has little bearing on what she is about to do.
That doesn't mean she would necessarily change what she had done before.
"I wanted to show that it may be wild, it may be surprising, it may be frightening at times, but in the end when you look back, you can realize that it was all worth going through."
Stachoski has been living in Bienfait since 2007, and spent time living there before that as well. The novel was published in August, and the author was at the Estevan Public Library on Nov. 17 for a reading.
"I love writing because it doesn't interfere with my jumping from one thing to another. It's become one of my primary loves as far as artistic things to do," Stachoski said, adding that she used to oil paint as well.
"I began writing after taking college courses, and I found that I really liked telling stories when I wrote," she added. "The more fantastical the story, the more fun I had writing it. I had as much fun writing stories as reading, so eventually I started writing a story and it just went on and on and on until I got to the end."
She said she surprised herself a little by just how much she wrote, and added she had a "wild" time while writing the book.
While she is the creative driving force of the stories and writing, it's her husband Lyndon who took on the role of agent. She had been sitting on the story for some time until he came home one day informing her that he'd found a publisher.
"(He) suddenly came home and said, 'Guess what, honey? I got a publisher for you.' He had already shopped it around. I had no idea. It turned out that he had that much faith that what I had written was worth reading.
"When it comes to an artistic creation of your own, sometimes you'll look at it and you'll look at it and think it's never ready," Stachoski added, noting that's how she felt about her novel.
Her husband felt otherwise, considering it polished enough for publishing. The desire to always change one more thing to make it just a little better was a tough one to overcome on her own.
Stachoski said the ending leaves more story to be told, and she is well into writing the sequel. She is a little more confident in her ability now, adding that the second novel will be even better than her first.
The novel is available online through Chapters and there is a copy at the library available to borrow.
