I was studying social work at the time and there was a lot of talk regarding representation, amongst counsellors with lived experience and in creative media. How empowering it could be to find a hero just like you in a character your watching or reading. I'm not just talking about gender, race, religion or sexuality either, but about disability, whether that physical, emotion, or developmental. It got me thinking, I had never considered myself different. In fact, I had always done everything in my power to ensure nobody knew that I wasn't exactly like them, but a few things had happened that had forced me to reconsider. See, I have a prosthetic eye. I look just like anyone else, unless you look closer (time spent as a cadet with St. Johns Ambulance was fun. One pupil was always unresponsive, which if you don't know, is usually representative of a significant head injury.)
So, what made me finally open my eyes, so to speak? Firstly, a few years earlier I had gone in a study abroad experience and like all good universities, they wanted to know all about my medical history and how it affected my say to day life, what to do if there was an emergency and I was kind startled because it was something I just always lived with. You don't really get emergencies with a prosthetic eye, unless you drop it and it breaks, but while annoying, it's not really an emergency (and I've never broken mine by dropping it, despite being told to do so in order to get a new one.)
The second thing was my Aikido instructor telling me that I had to start informing the grading panels of my health needs. The grading panels needed to know about my eye, after all, I don't see distance in the same way as people with two working eyes and I also needed to be somewhat wary during weapons work. This was awkward for me, because I'd always been sure to make sure nobody knew except those absolutely necessary, Afterall, kids can be cruel. Secrecy and pretending to be 'normal' had been so ingrained in me that I didn't like having to open up to so many people about it.
Reality is though, I had nothing to be ashamed of and just before NaNoWriMo 2019, I was inspired to write a story about a girl just like me (ok, she's way more awesome, but that's ok!) I actually started writing as soon as the idea struck. I don't plan my work, but I just wrote about a world where your station in life was dictated by how well you could see. Your social rank would fall if you needed glasses or were blind, or even worse, had no eyes at all.
The girl, who is eventually called Juniper is going blind and her mother is bemoaning the fact that she's going to be completely and utterly useless (no such thing as adaptive technologies in this world) and so she agrees to send the girl to an experimental treatment program to try and get her sight back and that is where the story begins.
I was in the past an avid Dungeons and Dragons player, and beholders were fascinating, so I had the thought, what would happen if every set of prosthetic eyes had a different ability. The ability to turn someone to stone or to read languages, shoot lasers or see through walls. Juniper is being held at a facility that is experimenting with exactly this and as she later discovers, she's not the first and she won't be the last. When she goes on the run, she becomes embroiled in a plot for world domination and she teams up with other kids like herself, some of whom were successful experiments and others who were failed experiments.
Their lives are thrown into turmoil by her arrival, the girl with the interchangeable eyes and now they're on a mission to not only save themselves, but the entire Continent too.
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