Works in progress
The Coal and the Diamond (working title)
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, four eighth-graders open a time capsule and find... a bunch of junk. Hidden among that junk was something that wasn't supposed to be found — a coded message hidden in an old phonebook, waiting for the right person to care.
Aside from serving on the student council together, Cindy, Andrew, Natalie, and Jessica have almost nothing in common. But once they found that note, none of them were able to walk away from it.
What follows is part investigation, part collision as four eighth-graders open doors — and wounds — asking questions, piecing together a puzzle, and getting closer to something that was buried for a reason.
Some secrets don't want to stay hidden.
Some never should have been hidden at all.
The Algorithm (working title)
Mya Lopez built one of the most powerful social media platforms in the world — the kind that knows what you want, keeps you up past midnight without quite knowing why, that makes the world feel both bigger and smaller at the same time. She's brilliant, driven, and more aware than anyone of what her creation is capable of. And Frank Kozlowski is her latest subscriber.
Frank is sixty-three, a salesman by trade, a husband, father, and grandfather by choice. A man who never needed the internet to tell him who he was — until he did. It started with a few clicks, curious whimsy, but within a year he'd been sucked down a rabbit hole so deep his family barely recognizes him.
The Algorithm is about more than Frank. It's about someone you probably already know — and what happens when the system designed to keep them scrolling finally goes too far.