Sara Itka
Books
Chaotic Cupids: When Love Goes Awry
Love is in the air…or is it? When it comes to love, anything can go awry. Free fall into a world where love, magic, and wonder can devolve into chaos and confusion. These 23 original stories and poems take aim at your favorite romance tropes across galaxies, through portals, even into the afterlife…
Brought to life by New York Times bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson and award-winning editor Allyson Longueira—and their graduate students at Western Colorado University—Chaotic Cupids: When Love Goes Awry showcases the beautiful chaos of love in all its many and wondrous forms, with unexpected results, hilarious mistakes, and terrifying consequences. (Winged cherub optional.)
My story, For the Love of Farkakteh Phones is a hilarious rom-com about a happily-single young woman whose Bubbe prays so hard for her to find her beshert, an angel of love comes to matchmake her—and runs into technical difficulties.
Weird Wilderness: a Cryptid Bestiary
You may not have ever seen them, but you know them: Bigfoot, Mothman, chupacabras, the Jersey Devil, and Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. Cryptids exist everywhere around the world on land, in the air, and under the water. Collected in this anthology are twenty short stories featuring a wide variety of cryptids as well as the cryptozoologists who discover them, hunt them, study them, or shelter them. With genres ranging from fantasy and science fiction to historical fiction and romance, there is something for everyone to enjoy. As an added twist, each story utilizes at least one form of epistolary writing to help tell the story, including text messages, podcast interviews, newspaper articles, and journal entries.
My story, Hunting the Headline, reports the struggles of a journalism grad student as he hunts a good grade in the most elusive cryptid of all: the infamous "Florida Man."
Once Upon A Future Vol. 4
Once Upon a Future Time Volume 4 is a brilliant new anthology by The Brothers Uber, featuring creative stories which put a science fiction twist on classic fairy tales. With so many phenomenal authors in the contents, each story will keep you turning the page!
I'm honored to be contributing my story Artificial Beauty, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty in a series of data logs from an experiment with Artificial Intelligence. It explores the nature of emotion and love from the perspective of digital minds not designed to experience either.
Weapon of The Wall
Everyone has a version of themselves in a parallel world of magical technology, separated by an extra-dimensional barrier called The Wall. Everyone, except one seventeen-year-old girl, whose selves inexplicably merged, granting her the power to enter The Wall at will—and against her will, every night in her dreams. It’s in those dreams a Know-it-all Prissy-Pants Prince finds her, begging her help to “foil the machinations of a paranoid king”—his father. She’s the only one who can access The Wall, and his only hope to repair the breach the king tore open.
Which is all fine, but what have the worlds ever done for her? The same king ordered her death five years ago, and she had to fight for herself then. She’s fought for herself since, and that’s a full time job. She doesn’t have time or care to be a hero.
But the breach isn’t the threat ends. With a superweapon on the edge of firing, the Prince can’t afford to give her that choice. He drags her through The Wall, forcing her to confront everything she’s tried so hard to not care about, until she isn’t sure what she would do with a choice if she had one. The threat won’t stay confined to one side of The Wall, and to save one world, she’ll have to fight for both, even if it means facing the fears which have haunted her since her selves merged.
Open Secrets
Open Secrets is a young adult political intrigue novel, following Princess Rosewood of the seafaring nation of Erlan, as she and her twin brother, Rowan, prepare to assume greater responsibility as Crown Heirs when they turn nineteen next moonsturn. But while her brother is used to the spotlight and crowds, Rosewood is more accustomed to the shadows of drawn curtains, and the silence of her bedroom. She yearns to do more for her country, but the pain and fatigue of constant migraines threaten to drown her with each passing tide.
With turmoil brewing on foreign shores, Rowan must sail to attempt to calm the seas, leaving Rosewood to manage on her own, especially once their father, the King, falls ill. She starts to rely more on Varen, the young Captain of War whom her father recommends to her for marriage. But when she uncovers a plot to kill her brother, she can no longer trust anyone, least of all the foul-mouthed stranger, Marcus, she meets while spying on the conspirators. Lives are on the line, her country is in danger, and she can’t hide in her room any longer. Even if the pain willn’t let her move, she has to act, or her family’s chances will end up, along with Rowan’s ship, at the bottom of the ocean.