Chaos NaNo 2011 - Brown Leaves and P&P

[Chao]

For simplicity's sake:
White Color = Regular NaNo (story to be written in German)
Green Color = Bonus-Fanfiction during NaNo (story to be written in English)


Brown Leaves

Fandom: Original
Genre: Mystery/Fantasy

As always this story will be written in German as it is again intended for the same archive where I always upload my NaNos. However, input on character-development and plot which I'll post here on English are always welcome.

SPOILER: Click to show

When God created the world, he also created all the trees in Paradise. Some are well known from legends, some people invented because they thought such trees could have existed there and some are still existing, though only very few know about them.
Two such trees are the Tree of the Living and the Tree of the Dying. For every person, who is living a full life, the Tree of the Living bears a leaf. When the person dies the leaf shrivels and falls to the ground. For every person, who is dying, the Tree of the Dying bears a leaf. When the person passes on, the leaf shrivels and falls to the ground.
Now, one would think, that the leaves on the Tree of the Dying are only short-lived, but sometimes dying takes a whole life.
However, sometimes it happens, that a person is trapped in the wrong world. The people in the world of the Living think these persons are ghosts, but this is wrong, since 'ghost' is a valid category to choose for when one passes on. The people in the world of the Dying think these persons are zombies, but this is wrong as zombies are ghosts-in-training who have not yet managed to transform to their new misty form. On the trees these people can be identified as brown leaves. And this is what the Guardian of the Tree calls them.
Each of the trees has a guardian, who is the same person and yet is not, since he is once living on the one side of the mirror and then again on the other side of the mirror. And the mirror (in fact any mirror) can be used to contact his other self. The Guardian is also the only person who can see the leaves on the tree, all other persons always see a bare tree.
But the Guardian is not the only one living this double life. He is helped with his task by the Scout, who is the only one who can identify a person as a brown leaf. So when the Guardian spots a brown leaf, he informs his other self, who in turn asks the Scout to go and find the brown leaf among the people of their world.

Now, what will happen, if suddenly more and more leaves on the trees turn brown due to some pest infestation? What happens if the balance between living and dying is completely disrupted?

SPOILER: Click to show

The two (or rather four) main characters are Joshua and Caleb.
Joshua owns a bar in Sheffield, UK. He is also gay and happens to be the current Guardian of the Tree.
Caleb runs a successful engineering service company in Sheffield, UK. Depending on the side of the mirror, he is one time gay and one time hetero. He also happens to be the current Scout.
In one version, Joshua and Caleb are a happy couple; in the other version Joshua would love to be in a relationship with Caleb, but Caleb wants to know nothing of the sort. Which of course for this combination makes working together a little more stressful.

Advice these two/four can get from a former guardian and a former scout, who belonged to different sides of the mirrors, but fell in love and chose as afterlife an existence in the mirror.
During their lifetime (which was in the Victorian Era), Edgar was the scout and Cassandra the guardian. Cassandra was married to Edgars counterpart, but the marriage was not happy. Edgar was only the brother-in-law of Cassandra's counterpart, however there was again little love between them. Strange enough for those two, to fall in love then and chose the mirror to be able to live together...

Questions which are not yet answered are: Who/What causes this pest infestion?
I only know it should be something which is tied to the stone-age caves just outside of Sheffield and I would love to have an epic end time battle at the end of the novel.


***

What if

Fandom: Pride & Prejudice
Genre: Love, etc.

I know that the working title is a little boring, but well, it pretty much sums up the general idea of the story...

This story will be my first try of an epistolary story and will be written in English (for variety's sake as well as because I usually read and watch 'Pride and Prejudice' in English), so excerpts will be posted here. However, I'll only work on this story, if I managed to finish my quota on the regular NaNo for the respective day. This story is like an incentive for my muse to remain cooperative *g*

SPOILER: Click to show

What if Mr. Bennet died before any of his daughters are married and Mrs. Bennet's worst fears of starving on the hedgerows comes to pass? How will a family of six capricious females manage on an income of 250 pounds per year, plus whatever their relatives might add for their support? And will there be still a chance for the happy end we know and love with Jane marrying Bingley and Elizabeth marrying Darcy?

The story will start at around the time Elizabeth returns from Kent.

Research-Help-Request: "New System of Domestic Economy" by Mrs. Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell gives an overview of the reasonable expenditures of a family of five (parents plus three children) with a yearly income of 250 pounds. An extract of the overview is given in "A History of the Cost of Living - John Burnett".
While the extract is already extremely helpful (seeing that the Bennet-women would have about the same money), having the complete list of items and money allotted would be much better. Unfortunately this book (unlike the popular cooking book by the same authoress, of which I have a reprint-copy and a scan of a historic original) is not available and seems to be so rare that you can only find it once in a while in serious auction houses, where it is sold for 200 $ and more.
So if any of you, who happens to live in an English speaking country and has access to a well sorted library which also contains old books from the 19th century, could check if the library has the above mentioned volume and provide me perhaps with an e-mail contact, I'd be truly grateful.

[Chao]

Yay! I knew that meeting my writing group would be productive in a creative way. I finally have an idea for my villain, and I already like this villain, because he simply wants to survive. Happens that he is some remnant of ancient celtic mythology and he is allergic to the trees. So he starts to fight the trees. He does not necessarily know that his fighting the trees hurts the humans, but because of this allergy he becomes more and more insane and eventually does no longer care if his fight means the end of the world because he disturbes the balance between living and dying so much.
Of course he is highly intelligent and having existed for so long means that he knows a lot...

I don't know yet how he fits into the real life of my protagonists, if he is completely independent or has some relationship (if only being an occassional customer in Joshua's bar) with them... but first I think I'll research a bit the topic of celtic mythology to see who he really is.

Anyway, I am really happy to finally have an inkling of my villain and that I can easily understand his motivation and sympathize with him ;D

[Jayeee]

The concept of a Tree of the Living and a Tree of the Dying is really interesting. And I love the dynamics you've formed between your central characters. I'm also very intrigued about your new villain! =D
Definitely will be watching this story move along.

[Chao]

Dynamics will be one of the major problem. Also the dynamics between those of the living and those of the dying part of population.

Okay, after about a week I now can proudly look at some progress in my planning.

SPOILER: Click to show

This is the first villain ever I created/found, who I really like!

Name is Neil Smith, but in reality is the ancient Nisien from the Welsh mythology.

As far as mythology mentions him, he is half-brother of the Welsh king, who is also a Giant, and well, to me this means that he is just human in appearance, but don't look to closely at his genes. Wouldn't look too human under the microscope.

Far more famous than Nisien is his twin-brother Efnisien. While Nisien means the peace loving, Efnisien simply means he is not peace loving. As such Efnisien caused a lot of trouble, almost starting a war, being the reason for his half-sister's marriage going awry, eventually really starting an all-killing fight and finally sacrificing himself by being thrown alive into a magic cauldron which revives the dead, thereby destroying the cauldron.

Mythology tells us that Nisien survives this fight, returns home, goes to stay on some island for 80 years, again returns home only to find it changed and that's the last we see of him in the legends. No line about his dying.

So I think, that Nisien is still alive, he simply decided to stay in the Otherworld, where nobody would worry about his appearance always remaining that of a young man of about 30 years.

As time changes, faith on the British Isles changes as well, Christianity taking over and less and less people are able to access the Otherworld. Resulting in life there becoming rather boring with all the same personalities around Nisien. That's why he starts a few hundred years after his disappearance to visit human world again, but only to stay for a decade or two and then returns to the Otherworld. By repeating this about every century, he has quite some knowledge and some skills, though rather patchy, depending on what he was focussing during the respective visit.

That's until the Paradise Trees come to England, because the trees are always where the Guardian lives. First time for the trees to be in England and as both Paradise and Otherworld bear mythical signatures, which are not compatible, the trees and Otherworld are bound to clash. Unfortunately the trees are much stronger than the Otherworld as Christianity, which is still predominant on the British Isles, lends them strength. Therefore Otherworld can't prevent that the roots of the trees dig into Otherworld, slowly spreading over Otherworld's sky. Biggest problem however is that all the characters in Otherworld are allergic to Paradise-stuff and the more sky is covered by the roots, the stronger the allergic reactions become.
Which is why Nisien decides to fight against the trees, eventually, because of the allergy, not caring whether the world is destroyed in the process or not. Well, all he really wants is to survive, but the trees make him go slightly insane and he stops caring.

As for him being the peace loving one, well, I guess he has the potential for not being peace loving, but simply appeared as the peace loving because Efnisien was such a trouble maker. I like this guy!!! (Now all I have to make sure is that he is not stealing the protagonists' limelight.)

[Chao]

There is also some progress on "What if", in so far as I most recently finished reading an epistolary novel ('Lady Susan' by Jane Austen) to see how epistolary novels really work. Once I had found out how best to read this book (in my case by reading it aloud so that I can give each writer a distinct voice), it was a really funny book. But best of all, I now know that I don't have to write a reply to every letter I know to be necessary for the story. Which means that I will have to write a letter from Mr. Philips to Mr. Collins informing him of his cousin's death, but I don't have to write Mr. Collins condolence letter to Mrs. Bennet, which I dreaded a lot. I now feel much more confident about this story.

[Chao]

First day and true to my promise from last NaNo to write down every side-character the moment he or she shows up in the novel, I have now four minor characters of various importance.
My favourite is Conrad. Simply because my one protagonist clearly had fun describing Conrad

But as author, Conrad did not want to write stories for kids. He wanted to be like Hemingway. Or Tolstoi. Or Joye. To be one of those authors who wrote ever so thick tomes, which later would be called classics and which would be used by most people to adjust crooked shelves.

Thanks to a word-war I have written more than I thought I might be capable of today. Really a good day.

I even wrote the first letter for the epistolary fanfiction. Elizabeth to Charlotte, thanking her for the nice time in Kent. I found that it is very funny to imagine how she would have phrased the letter, being suret that Mr. Collins would insist on his wife at least reading him the important parts of such a letter...

[Chao]

This is the first NaNo I found someone I'm comfortable with doing wordwars and it's the first time I am well ahead of the graph and the first time where I don't know if what I'm writing is bullsteamy dung or might be worth reading in the end. And the first time I have simply fun writing all this down without thinking too much about it. Strange experience.

[Chao]

So, guess now that I finished my NaNo-story I should perhaps catch up here... in case anybody is wondering how my story developed...

Well... of course I ran into problems. Thankfully not time-wise, but once I crossed 25k I had to sit down every day for about five days to figure out where next to go, how to keep my story going on and actually moving on regarding the plot and not repeat the normal stuff over and over again. Guess the scenes from 20k-35k will be those I'll have to work on most when going over it again, starting tomorrow. But by the time I did my 34k-brainstroming, it was coming together nicely.

I even was to have a dragon!!!

Then I came down with this coughing virus which is currently all over the country. Problem is: it's a virus. So no clogging up your lungs, no hundreds of handkerchiefs per day, no helpful antibiotics and the assurance that you'll be better in latest one week, just a nagging cough, which will keep you up half the night and makes you head out the next day despite feeling groggy, but you simply have to get some cough suppressant. So, armed with a cough suppressant and a doctor-prescribed extra dose of sleep (aka three days off work per doctor's orders), I could sleep a lot and have a lot of time for my writing. Which made up for Sundays.

Weekends this NaNo were the absolute opposite from last year. Where last year I would sit in my favourite cafe and write 4k, this year I found it too loud there (though undoubtedly it was as loud as this the year before), so going to the cafe was no good idea this year. And as my main writing sprints occurred in the evening starting with 19:40 (I was writing in 20 minute bursts, always starting at :40), but 19-21 saw me on the road changing quarters on Sundays, Sundays usually were those days I did not write even the 1667 words. 1200 more likely...

By the end of my cough-holiday so to call them, I was facing the 'epic battle'. Another thing I most likely will not write again. First of all, it was not epic. There were enough combatants, but I have no real clue about epic battles, so instead I described the huge chaos such a battle is and eventually it at least felt like a battle. So scratch the epic, add chaotic, and we have the fight. But even worse, following the fight, I had the sacrificing ritual. I knew all the solutions and yet was stumped how to deliver certain facts, which not even the dragon could know.

I was so thoroughly stumped that I had to scratch the idea of finishing the story on 25th at the 'last leg wordsprint meeting' of my writing group. At least a friend of mine managed to write her last 400 words and validate at the meeting amidst a hearty round of applause.

Even after I had managed past the information delivery part, I was still 2k away from 50k, meaning I'd have to write on Saturday. No problem per se... stay at home, pick a convenient :40 time and write away. Only that Saturday my provider came up with the brilliant idea of not letting me go online. How was I to wordwar with my faithful wordwar-sprinter without NaNo-Mail? How was I to validate? How was I to be kept happy and sane? Well... eventually after a good, long breakfast, I decided to go for a walk, run a few errands, and then pack up the laptop and had to the cafe to access their wifi. Noise or no noise I would reach those 50k. But thankfully once I got back from the post office armed with the advent calendar my mum had sent me, the provider had fixed whichever bug was preventing me and most likely all my neighbours if not the whole city from accessing internet (they tend to take down a whole area for maintenance, usually from Friday to Saturday once a year, so I guess it was that) and I was to happily write at home.

By 18:40 I was 400 words away from the 50k and only had to write the epilogue. It was the first time this November, that for the 18:40 to 19:00 wordsprint my faithful writing buddy won. Because guess what: My inner critic decided to show for the epilogue! He had left me in peace all November (which means that a lot of scene will need a lot of refining), and now he shows up for the epilogue!!! I did not even finish the epilogue in that wordsprint, but gracefully slithered past 50k.
19:40 to 20:00 took care of the rest of the epilogue, and 20:10 saw me cut myself in my right index finger... good thing I waited with dinner till after I finished writing. *drop*

But in the end I am pretty happy with my story. I think I managed to tell the story I had in mind, I did not have to slay my villain, and the world did not end either. _{I even managed to keep my promise to write down any side-character's name the moment he/she showed up in the story.}


As for my fanfiction project of an epistolary Pride&Prejudice fanfiction, I wrote aboout 5000 words. Definitely not as many letters as I had days where I finished the daily word goal, but here I ran into greater problems than with my NaNo-story...

So here is what I have so far:

Letter 1: Elizabeth to Charlotte - thanking her for the hospitality during the stay in Kent and hinting her annoyance at the idea of their family going to Brighton

Letter 2: Mr. Philips to Mr. Collins - informing him that Mr. Bennet has died

Letter 3: Elizabeth to Charlotte - expressing her thanks for Lady Catherine's interference, which means that the Collinses will not travel immediately to Longbourn, giving the Bennets some time to grieve and sort things out

Letter 4: Elizabeth to Charlotte - informing her that they have secured new lodgings near Meryton and will move within a fortnight

Letter 5: Mrs. Jenkinson to Mrs. Annesley - informing her that the Collinses have departed to Longbourn

Letter 6: Mrs. Forster to Lydia - telling her that had Mr. Bennet lived, Lydia would have been invited to accompany them as special friend

Letter 7: Elizabeth to Mrs. Gardiner - reporting how the family is adapting, telling her about newly gleaned insights regarding her youngest sister and asking her to take Lydia instead of herself on the northern tour.

Letter 8: Mrs. Gardiner to Elizabeth - agreeing that Elizabeth should stay at home, agreeing on taking a greater interest in Mary, Kitty and Lydia, suggesting to take Kitty with them.

Letter 9: Elizabeth to Mrs. Gardiner - agreeing that Kitty is more deserving than Lydia, relating a domestic scene to show just how deserving Kitty is

Letter 10: Lydia to Mrs. Forster - complaining that it's unfair that everybody is allowed to travel except of her, also giving a hint how obnoxious Mr. Collins is.

Problem is, that originally I had intended that Lydia travels into Derbyshire and strikes up a rewarding friendship with Georgianna Darcy. I had a vivid picture in mind about first meetings, of how annoying Lydia would be as travel companion and her complaints about unkind treatment in her letters to Kitty, while Mrs. Gardiner writes to Elizabeth. But Mrs. Gardiner was of course right in pointing out that it's Kitty who should be rewarded for good behaviour and not Lydia who is not showing any good behaviour.
On the plus side: It gives me the opportunity to have Lydia try to get to Brighton on her own. Thus providing more plot
On the minus side: Kitty will not complain in her letters from Derbyshire and though I still intend her to meet Georgianna, it will not be the same beneficial meeting.

Next letter to write will most likely be Kitty telling about their visit to Blenheim. Followed by a letter from Mrs. Annesley to Mrs. Jenkinson about the imminent departure from London for Pemberley (which will introduce the Bingleys to the story). After which I'll have Lydia receive another letter from Mrs. Forster (so that Lydia comes up with the idea of making her way to Brighton on her own).

My muse just hinted that I might give the story a twist with Bingley and a more refined Kitty pairing up and Jane being taken in by Colonel Fitzwilliam who would then be allowed to play a part in the 'rescue Lydia from her own folly'-scheme... not sure about that...