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Welcome!

I’m a speculative fiction writer working on several projects including a science fantasy/dystopian YA novel about humans modified with animal DNA, a paranormal YA thriller that’s a mashup of Sixth Sense and Twilight – but with a sinister twist, and the occasional short story. I am currently looking for an agent for my completed book, Taming Death, the first volume in a YA fantasy adventure series.

Books

Taming Death (currently unpublished)

When soldiers from a faraway city ambush fifteen-year-old Livia, a deadly power awakens inside her, killing everything around her—nine soldiers, the wolves who came to defend her, even the grass and trees. As a naturally gifted healer who has always shared a strange bond with animals and has a heart as big as the sky, this new power terrifies her. In hopes of learning to control her strange power from the only other person who shares it—the infamously cruel and immortal President Grimmer—Livia abandons her family and follows a young soldier across the continent.

Taming Death is set in a post-apocalyptic North America where natural disasters are commonplace and some people are gifted with the ability to tame the forces of nature. An Austin fantasy and science fiction critique group, the Slug Tribe, critiqued it chapter by chapter. Five beta readers ages thirteen-fourteen (and one eleven year old who reads up) also provided feedback. It is a standalone YA fantasy novel, but is also the first volume of a planned five-book series.

 

Bio

Becky Breidenbach is a data analyst and evaluator for a large bureaucracy by day and a writer by night. As a child, she showed incredible potential as a budding author, winning the elementary school-wide contest in kindergarten for a story about her cat, Cloudy, and going on to publish one of the only non-depressing poems she wrote in seventh grade in a national magazine, Merlyn’s Pen. However, aside from an errant creative writing class during undergrad at the University of Michigan, other more economically rewarding pursuits and a variety of time-wasting distractions kept her from her passion for writing for much too long.

She is now enthusiastically pursuing her childhood dream job again. In addition to shirking her household responsibilities to spend most of her free time writing her first book, she’s a frequent Slug Tribe attendee, a bimonthly writing critique group in Austin for science fiction and fantasy writers. She has participated in the ArmadilloCon writer’s workshop for a number of years. She is a member of the Writer’s League of Texas and attended the 2017 Agents and Editors Conference.

Becky has a master’s degree in a totally unrelated field (Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas). She is from the strip-malled suburbs of Detroit, Michigan but now lives in Austin, Texas with her spouse, a very large bed-hog dog, and three mischievous cats.