My Eclectic Life

The Man Machine

Raven At The Gate

When seventeen-year-old Raven Yazzie is sent from New Mexico to live with her estranged father at a U.S. air base in Tokyo, she wants nothing more than to disappear. But Japan’s thinning veil between worlds awakens her buried shamanic power, revealing Oni that stalk the city and a spirit war beneath the neon lights. Guided by a crow that may be her mother’s soul, Raven joins a renegade onmyōji to stop an ancient fire-gate from reopening. To save both worlds, she must embrace the magic she fears and sacrifice the one thing she’s never had—belonging. This Urban Fantasy story is my submission is Leanna's submission to the 2025 Twilight Frontiers presented by Frontier Works. writing contest

Dead Hand

The Dominion Protocol: Those Who Refuse the Throne

Power doesn’t vanish. It mutates.

Jessica Sanchez thought she’d escaped the programs that built her—the experiments, the lies, the handlers who pulled strings from the dark. But when the President of the United States starts repeating his past word for word, Jessica knows the script has changed.

Old friends pull her in. A journalist sees patterns no one else can. A whisper campaign points toward Vanguard. But deeper still, beneath agencies and black budgets, there’s Dominion, a program that doesn’t control. It corrects.

As allies vanish and memories fracture, Jessica finds herself hunting the architects of a new kind of warfare—one where the enemy rewires reality, not just perception. And the only thing more dangerous than what they’ve done… is why.

Dominion Protocol Volume 7: Shadows of Tokyo

They told her it was a simple recovery job. A stolen Noh mask. An anonymous client. A clean break from the ghosts of Belize.

But when Jessica Sanchez arrives in Kyoto, she finds more than an artifact—she finds a trail of bodies, a whisper of a forgotten project, and a photograph that shouldn’t exist. Someone is pulling strings behind the scenes. Someone who knows her real name. Someone who knows she’s been here before.

As her team digs deeper, old symbols resurface, memories bleed through locked doors, and every lead draws her closer to a facility that was never supposed to be found. The past isn’t behind her. It’s buried beneath her feet—and it’s waking up.

The more she uncovers, the clearer it becomes: this isn’t about the masks. It’s about her.

Jessica Sanches: The Weight of Being

Conversations on Existence by Jessica Sanchez and Sam Holden

On a quiet patio overlooking the Belizean sea, as the ice melts in their whiskey glasses and the night settles in around them, Jessica and Sam talk.

Not about the missions. Not about the bodies left behind. But about being.

In this candid and contemplative collection, Jessica Sanchez—a former experiment turned investigator—and Sam Holden, her steadfast anchor, explore the writings of Camus, Kierkegaard, Beauvoir, and Nietzsche. They question the nature of identity, the burden of memory, and what it means to live authentically when your past was written by someone else.

Through reflections on books, films, and the philosophical weight of Jessica’s transformation, these dialogues peel back the noir to find something raw and human beneath.

GHOSTLIGHT

Some ghosts wear your face. Others ride your soul.

In the slums of the Redmond Barrens, identity is just another commodity—and Isilme Sorn’el sold hers a long time ago. Now known as Valkyrie, she’s a ghost-hardened warlock turned arcane specialist with too many scars and not enough sins left to confess.

But when bodies start turning up without heads—and their memories wiped clean—Valkyrie is pulled into a conspiracy where the killer isn’t just wearing a mask. It’s wearing her. An AI-spirit hybrid known only as the Dullahan is carving a path through the astral and Matrix alike, building itself from fragments of her forgotten past.

To stop it, Valkyrie must revisit everything she tried to bury: the lover she left behind, the god she once served, and the name she no longer dares to claim.

Because some battles aren’t fought with spells or blades.

Some battles are fought in the dark.

Dominion Protocol Volume 6: Black’s Gambit

She took the case for the money. A bored housewife, a cheating husband, a seedy hotel rendezvous—just another Tuesday in paradise.

But when both the husband and his lover end up dead behind a locked door, and Jessica’s name shows up on a hidden file buried deep in Vanguard’s old archives, the game changes fast.

Now Jessica’s on the run—again. With only the Police Chief she trusts and the ghosts she can’t outrun, she follows a cold trail to Montevideo. What she finds isn’t just a trap—it’s a message. One left by a man long thought dead. One that proves she was never the player.

She was the pawn.

And the board’s already in motion.

Dominion Protocol Volume 5: The Echoes that Remain

When a forgotten jungle near Mexico City reveals a city that shouldn’t exist, Jessica and her team are drawn into a mystery that defies maps—and memory. What begins as an investigation into a ghost town with no past spirals into a global hunt for the truth behind Vanguard’s resurrection and Jessica’s origin.

From shadowed alleys in Paris to the remnants of Cold War-era labs in Eastern Europe, Jessica must confront the possibility that she was never the original—only a copy of a memory that refuses to die. As the lines between past and present blur, she faces the most dangerous question of all: If she was never real to begin with, can she still choose who she becomes?

The Dominion Protocol Volume 4: Black Orchid

Some ghosts don’t stay dead. Some were never real to begin with.

Jessica Sanchez runs Black Orchid Investigations out of a hole-in-the-wall office in Belize — small jobs, big secrets, and the occasional brush with things better left in the dark. She had hoped to put the ordeal with Vanguard behind her, but life has a way of always dragging you back in.

The Dominion Protocol Volume 3: Echoes of the Self

She ran from her past. Now it’s waiting for her in the mirror.

After years in hiding, Olympic medalist Jessica Sanchez thought she left the ghosts behind. But when Leanna finds her again — with a letter from Argentina and a name Jessica hoped never to hear — Vanguard Biotechnics — everything unravels.

In the shadows of a forgotten facility, Jessica comes face-to-face with her worst fear: herself. Clones. Secrets. The terrifying proof that she may never have been the only one.