Post by Jove on Oct 30, 2013 15:11:49 GMT -5
Papercuts is my 2009/2010 Nano attempts reworked. The difference is I actually sort of know what I'm doing this time around. Almost everything about the story has been changed since I first came up with it, which is splendid since I was eleven at the time. There's no way it's going to fit in 50k, so I'm going to try and overachieve this year and see what happens. It's pretty ambitious considering I've never made it past 20k but you know what they say. Aim for the moon and even if you miss blah blah stars that's not how space works at all but never mind. Have a poorly written summary that is more or less the same as last year's and reveals no new information. Huzzah!
Elijah is fourteen years old and he sees dead people.
Not just dead people. Monsters and incomprehensible lapses in reality that no one else seems to notice. They tell him it's just stress, it's just his condition, it's just a chemical imbalance in his brain tricking his eyes and ears into seeing things that aren't real. What isn't real cannot hurt you, they tell him, so he turns his head and pretends not to see.
That is until the day of his grandmother's funeral, when a girl he's never met before shows up. She calls herself a witch and warns him not to go talking to strangers, especially dead ones. He's got a way with the unnatural though, so it isn't long before something shows up threatening his life. He's saved by Beatrice, the girl of his nightmares, who drags him into her merry circle of monster hunters and suspiciously pale classmates. As he gets pulled further into a series of deepening mysteries and conspiracy theories surrounding his small Southern hometown and the people that live in it, he must keep it's secrets hidden from his misanthropic new friend Lucy, who is obsessed with the supernatural and the occult, and determined to seek it out in order to destroy the human race.
Not just dead people. Monsters and incomprehensible lapses in reality that no one else seems to notice. They tell him it's just stress, it's just his condition, it's just a chemical imbalance in his brain tricking his eyes and ears into seeing things that aren't real. What isn't real cannot hurt you, they tell him, so he turns his head and pretends not to see.
That is until the day of his grandmother's funeral, when a girl he's never met before shows up. She calls herself a witch and warns him not to go talking to strangers, especially dead ones. He's got a way with the unnatural though, so it isn't long before something shows up threatening his life. He's saved by Beatrice, the girl of his nightmares, who drags him into her merry circle of monster hunters and suspiciously pale classmates. As he gets pulled further into a series of deepening mysteries and conspiracy theories surrounding his small Southern hometown and the people that live in it, he must keep it's secrets hidden from his misanthropic new friend Lucy, who is obsessed with the supernatural and the occult, and determined to seek it out in order to destroy the human race.
I hope that's sufficiently misleading. It's intended to be a series, but I'm not sure how that will play out anymore. Papercuts is the first book, Fanglorious is the second, and I'm leaning towards Missdirection (sic) as the title of the third.
I've played with the setting too much and realized it doesn't make much sense to have it in Mississippi - although it'd lose that Southern Gothic feel I was aiming for if I set it in the places that inspired it visually (western PA and upstate NY) On the other hand the northern US captures the decay and the overall melancholy tone well enough though... this is something I probably should have decided before October 30.
Guess what I did (again)