Author of the Week: Nicole Arlyn

The Sugarspear Chronicles
In a small town called Muddlewoods, a young girl named SADIE SUGARSPEAR survives the menace of her brutal stepfather. Sadie finds a sanctuary under a weeping willow and in the one thing her real father, SAM SUGARSPEAR, had left behind—a book about an imaginary land and the King that granted wishes, a book Sam read from each and every night to Sadie before he up and left.
But one day, when Ralph’s cruelty reaches unimaginable depths, she runs away and hides inside a crevice in her beloved willow tree. To her surprise, the tree opens up completely, sending Sadie falling down into the abyss.
When she comes to, she finds herself in a forest in a place called the Land of Thornesboggle. Recognizing the setting from her beloved book, Sadie sets off on a journey to find the wish granting King Orphanos, to ask him to take all her problems and pain away.
But to begin her search for the King, Sadie must rely more than ever on her wit and strength to escape the jealous Princess Faegria, fight off an Evil Witch, and control her own burgeoning love and lust for the handsome hunter on a horse, ALASDAIR ASTIGAN.
        
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THE SUGARSPEAR CHRONICLES follows the long, dangerous, and heartbreaking journey of a young girl who must dig deep into the heart of darkness to find the heroine within before she loses the one good thing she has left in her life: HOPE.

From every nook and cranny of this unfamiliar landscape, Sadie is confronted by the demons and monsters that she has carried inside her for so long, all of them coming to slimy and blood-thirsty life. There is nowhere to run. There is nowhere to hide. There is only one option—to use every drop of energy, wits, and faith she possesses to defeat the creatures that are coming for her to obtain the secret treasure that she unwittingly carries within her. 
It is a journey full of heartbreak, full of pain, full of physical challenges that seem insurmountable. It is a journey filled with giant snakes, kindly frogs, burning swamps, mud-men and witches, angels and vampires. It is a journey in which Sadie will not only test the limitations of her own strength, but will force her to learn to trust, to love, and to fight for what she believes in. It is a journey in which she falls in love, experiences sex and passion, and finds that the King of Wishes is not what she’d hoped he’d be. 
Ultimately, Sadie grows into a woman through the experience and when she encounters the one person who she has longed for more than anybody else, even more than the King himself—her father, Sam—she realizes that she has all the tools now to live her life without him, that inside, she has found the strength to make her own wishes come true. 

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Excerpt

A little closer and more downwards to a small black lake within the trees. Wood chips stuck to her skin as she squinted to see a golden dot, the blond hair of her friend, Billy Flath, hunting frogs in the middle of the lake. She made her way to the edge of the water. It looked like black ink. She could wait to drown when Billy left, she thought, but the thought came and went as she fell limp at the edge of the lake. It was cold. She was shaking and cold.
“Sadie.” Billy walked through the water to see her.
“I just want to sleep,” she said, stroking the oily water. She turned her face away from Billy and then flipped herself on her stomach. She couldn’t hear the water parting but she felt Billy come swiftly.
He knelt beside her. He planted his stick in the earth by her head. She clawed the wet sand under. She blew bubbles.
“Nothing,” she said. Blowing bubbles harder now, she knew she was fogging up the clouds somehow.
“Donʼt mind you crying, Sadie, even though I donʼt know what to say.”
“Donʼt say anything. Cause Iʼm not even doing it.”
She laid still now. He sat still too. She turned her head to him, gave one eye to his stick first, then up to his eyes. They were so blue between reddish rings, so blue within the fading light. He winked at her. She smiled with her lips closed at his shirtless chest, paler than her, with little muscles. Her face clasped and then sunk expressionless. He winked again as if practicing. He put one hand on her stomach and she shoved it off, then he saw the blood through the hollows of black water and she pushed herself up.
“You can go now,” she told him, crossing her legs, sitting.
“Nope,” he said. “He ainʼt working tonight and I donʼt wanna.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then leave me alone anyhow.” “K.”
He stood above her, his face stuck in fog. He reached his hands out. She looked down, the dark sand and forest litters beneath her. Eyes still down she reached for his hand. Holding the tips of his cold fingers, she got up crooked. She lifted her chin, watched his eyes as they came a little out of the smoke and he stared at her legs. He pulled down her dress that was sticking to her stomach. One of his eyes was wet. He rubbed it away. He took his stick. “Iʼll kill him.”

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Bio

Nicole is a writer and an actress born in Brooklyn, New York. She has worked in films such as Clay Pigeons, opposite Joaquin Phoenix; The Wedding Planner; and Brooklyn Bound, among many others. She has also performed, written and directed theatre productions in New York, Los Angeles, and Europe. She has also read her poems in many poetry lounges in Europe and America. She also is a song lyricist for musicians.
Nicole lives back and fourth between New York City and Rome, Italy, where she is at work on more novels.