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Post by Tam on Oct 1, 2012 14:50:20 GMT -5
NaNo 2009: KanataquestNaNo 2010: Bold as BrassCamp NaNo 2011: Matter (script)NaNo 2011: Iron WinterIn the beginning, the silver ship carrying the star goddess Iden crashed into the surface of a brand new planet. Then little more than a barren wasteland, under the goddess's care the desolate fragment of space would eventually give birth to the vast world of Encore and every living thing that calls it home. No one knows how long it has been since Iden left Encore for the last time. No one knows, but there are those who would do anything to find out. Keeyon Paco isn't one of them. A directionless teenager growing up in the dangerous northern territories of the East Kingdom, Keeyon has more pressing things to worry about in his daily life than the exact timeline of his civilization's creation, something that for centuries has exclusively been a subject for high-profile southern academics to debate and get angry about. But Keeyon has something the academics want: he talks to ghosts. An encounter with the living-impaired is hardly a rare experience on Encore, but actively seeking them out certainly is, and soon his unusual experience attracts the interest of a controversial young public speaker named Tyra Magena, whose research into the whereabouts of Iden's mythical shipwreck depends on the guidance of the oldest inhabitants of the planet, those who cannot die because they are already dead. However, Tyra also knows something her fellow academics don't. Tyra knows Encore is dying. Before long Keeyon and Tyra are swept up in a whirlwind of legend, conspiracy, magic, and unspeakable terrors as old as Encore itself as they struggle to decipher the true nature of their planet before Iden's magic disintegrates forever. They won't be alone in their search for answers. But they will be watched — possibly from the stars themselves. This is a story about people and monsters. It's a story about life and death, the end of the world and the start of a new one. This is a story about memory and faith, change and decay. This is a story about stories. But mostly, it's about a boy who doesn't save the world. ----- Likely influences for this story: my whole life I'm not really sure if this is actually going to happen next month, but I would like it to. I've been sitting on this story since I was 12, and if you know anything about my writing, you... probably know that this is kind of my baby. So. I guess we'll see what happens. ...also I seem to be continuing the trend of writing a NaNo whose themes suspiciously mirror Rikku's again this year (this year seems to be ghosts and palerom, whoops)
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Post by Zylaa on Oct 1, 2012 15:05:48 GMT -5
Aaaaaa this sounds so incredibly epic. <3
"But mostly, it's about a boy who doesn't save the world." There needs to be a word for the sort of writerly swoon one gets when reading a particularly awesome sentence. I writer-swooned reading that. <3
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Post by Rikku on Oct 1, 2012 18:32:28 GMT -5
I was just thinking that mine was mirroring you, heh (and also Zylaa's? like wow maybe I should go for a kids-having-adventures story after all, because palerom and ghosts - and revolutions! - are all great things but I don't even care terribly about my story as of yet, I might not do them justice >.> but then again wow what cool things) but of course mainly I was thinking YAY
because I am glad you're gonna try to write this thing. :3 You can do it! I am pretty darn sure you can do it.
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Post by Zylaa on Oct 1, 2012 19:12:01 GMT -5
(Rikku I have much more faith in your ability to do them justice than mine. XD And I mean the revolution might not even happen in my book, and I have some definite flushed romance planned all over the place, and really even if all three of us wrote off the exact same summary I am sure we'd come up with completely different interpretations. So write what you will!)(Is conversation ok on these threads sorry Tamia)
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Post by Nova on Oct 2, 2012 18:30:26 GMT -5
Aaaaaa this sounds so incredibly epic. <3 "But mostly, it's about a boy who doesn't save the world." There needs to be a word for the sort of writerly swoon one gets when reading a particularly awesome sentence. I writer-swooned reading that. <3 i completely agree =D |
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Post by Tam on Oct 3, 2012 12:41:33 GMT -5
Aaaaaa this sounds so incredibly epic. <3 "But mostly, it's about a boy who doesn't save the world." There needs to be a word for the sort of writerly swoon one gets when reading a particularly awesome sentence. I writer-swooned reading that. <3 Aaaaaa this sounds so incredibly epic. <3 "But mostly, it's about a boy who doesn't save the world." There needs to be a word for the sort of writerly swoon one gets when reading a particularly awesome sentence. I writer-swooned reading that. <3 i completely agree =D Eeeeee. <3 Wow. That feeling is my favourite feeling in the world. I am rather stunned but beyond happy that I managed to inspire it in someone else. Thank you. I was just thinking that mine was mirroring you, heh (and also Zylaa's? like wow maybe I should go for a kids-having-adventures story after all, because palerom and ghosts - and revolutions! - are all great things but I don't even care terribly about my story as of yet, I might not do them justice >.> but then again wow what cool things) but of course mainly I was thinking YAY because I am glad you're gonna try to write this thing. :3 You can do it! I am pretty darn sure you can do it. There is mutual mirroring going on, I suspect! Which is actually really cool; if we NTWF folk didn't unconsciously trade ideas and storyfeels all the time then what kind of friends would we be. I really like your princethief palerom idea, and I think you should go with it. =D I mean. Kids and adventures are great (so great), but there's no sense swapping out just because a few of us are sharing a couple of similar elements between us. ...besides, judging by what i know of our three writing styles, these stories are all gonna be really different (Rikku I have much more faith in your ability to do them justice than mine. XD And I mean the revolution might not even happen in my book, and I have some definite flushed romance planned all over the place, and really even if all three of us wrote off the exact same summary I am sure we'd come up with completely different interpretations. So write what you will!)(Is conversation ok on these threads sorry Tamia) Haha, it's totally cool. xD I don't mind in the slightest. Plus you're exactly right; we're all different breeds of writer and our stories are guaranteed to come together in dramatically different ways. Write what you wiiiiiiiill! I will probably update this thread a bit later with some character profiles and stuff (yeah so a bunch of you are sort of acquainted with them already, but honestly they're not really the same as they were when I wrote about them for Neopets, so there might be some rather confusing contradictions erhaha), but um, for now, have a Keeyon!  These are the best clothes Keeyon owns. He's very proud. |
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Post by Tam on Oct 15, 2012 15:29:38 GMT -5
HEY LOOK I WROTE UP SOME CHARACTER THINGS 16. Born in Askhet, a trading post in the Devil's Sandbox, a desert in the interior of the West Kingdom. Keeyon was two years old the first time he saw someone die. Her name was Annia Fogles, a slow-speaking old woman habitually enlisted by Keeyon's mother to watch over her two young boys while she was out looking for work. She died in the middle of reading Keeyon a bedtime story one night, and Keeyon closed her eyes so his little brother would think she was sleeping. He'll never know whether the part of him that didn't cry, didn't blink, didn't hesitate — stayed calm and practical even as his clumsy toddler fingers brushed over the creased skin of Annia Fogles's eyelids — was born that night, or if it had always been there. But after that night, it never really left.
Nothing about Keeyon is straightforward. Clever but easily distracted, hotheaded but undirected, he has a lot of time to think and very little worth thinking about. He turned to stories at a very early age, got sharp and cynical and fell in love with words. They made it easier to survive living in Old Guitenni Post, a tiny logging village as far north as it is possible to go before you run smack up against the Forest, but they didn't make it any easier to accept it. What Keeyon wants more than anything else is to become one of Iden's Knights — a sort of special police force charged with the defence of all human settlements in the East Kingdom from ghosts and other supernatural threats. Keeyon is fearless in all the ways he shouldn't be, and he's spent more hours wandering around the Forest talking to ghosts (and occasionally narrowly escaping ghosts) than everyone in Guitenni has put together. His experience with the paranormal and his familiarity with death draws him to the idea of helping people deal with their own ghost problems, but Iden's Knights are an old order with their own traditions and rules, and it just so happens that the most basic tradition is You Must Be Initiated By Age 13 and the number one rule is You Must Take Up Arms to Defend Those Weaker Than You. Keeyon hasn't been 13 in nearly four years, and he's never been stronger than anyone, much less taken up arms to defend them.
Iden's Knights dislike him a little more every time he reapplies.
Despite a certain ever-present anxiety and his occasionally neurotic behaviour, one thing is certain: Keeyon Paco has more guts than he knows what to do with. It would probably just take the right kind of push to turn him into something great.
Whether that greatness ends up being a good or bad thing for him and the rest of the world will probably depend on what form that push takes. 17. Born in Stalit, the capital of East Kingdom. Tyra's family was fairly wealthy and cultured and thus chose to educate her outside of any formal academic setting, which essentially allowed her to blaze through her entire basic education by the time she was fourteen. She currently holds one degree in history from the Royal University and she's working towards an upgrade, but lately she's been somewhat distracted by her growing notoriety outside the University. For the last few years, Tyra has grown increasingly interested in the unsolved mystery of Iden's ship, a subject that only minimal research has ever been conducted on. Tyra's unusually eclectic approach to the topic (using mythology, folklore, and popular stories as the sources for her work) has put her at the centre of a popular debate in Stalit's academic community — especially among the (predominantly very old and very male) members of the Guild of Explorers, who hate her public lectures not quite as much as they can't get enough of them.
They are paying her rather a lot to keep doing them.
Tyra <3< The Academic Community
On a personal level, she is every bit as forceful and ambitious as you'd think. She's nothing short of a prodigy in many areas (while she's best known for her historical work, she's also well-versed in math and sciences, particularly the still somewhat distrusted field of engineering) and it's not a rare event that someone refers to her as a genius. Whether or not they're right, Tyra has a bad habit of letting her intellect get her into trouble with the wrong sorts of people, in much the same way as she has a bad habit of letting her intellect get her into trouble with the right sorts of people. She can be cold, dismissive and occasionally even cruel, but once something catches her interest, it's unlikely she'll ever let go (a fact that applies to people as well as mythological shipwrecks). 19. Born in First Haven, a tiny, long-forgotten community in the far north — further north than the most isolated outposts of East Kingdom, further north even than the furthest reaches of the Forest — that no one's ever heard of, much less visited. Jeri showed up in Keeyon's life out of the blue one day, very much like a happily confused lost puppy, only as it turns out with a much higher potential to get them both kidnapped by a necromancer. Jeri hails from a very old part of Encore, a part so old that the rest of the planet has more or less forgotten it ever existed. But exist it does, and very slowly, thanks to the curiosity of wanderers like Jeri, the rest of the world is beginning to remember it.
Jeri is pathologically friendly. Growing up in close quarters with a group of several hundred people where everyone was basically your extended family in some way or another, he has very little respect for personal boundaries and tends to be rather clingy and in-your-face, but he's cheerful and polite and most people are more charmed than unnerved by his mannerisms. He has far more energy and enthusiasm for life than one person can possibly hold, commonly leading to eccentric and reckless behaviour as he tries to take in everything the world outside First Haven has to offer all at the same time. He is entirely ruled by his heart, easily making connections with all kinds of people but frequently falling into moody slumps, particularly when he's feeling bored or neglected. He's easily led, resulting in both a lot of really ridiculous spontaneous adventures and a lot of decisions he probably ends up regretting later. So the basic gist of the interpersonal relationships here are the blatant Keeyon/Tyra moirallegiance (for anyone not familiar with weird internet fandoms, moirallegiance is like a really strong platonic relationship that is based on mutual support and a balancing of very different but complementary traits), the Keeyon/Jeri broship (they are total bros and together they understand absolutely nothing about the world and it's adorable) and the weird Tyra/Jeri aspect which is... sort of vague and underdeveloped so far honestly, but definitely starts as an unlikely friendship in which neither one understands the other in the slightest but they are still somehow amused by each other anyway. Aaaand those are the main three, but I'll write up some really short blurbs for the other important characters at some point maybe? I've got a brother and an adventurer and a soldier and a captain and an alien and a healer and a hipster and a scholar and a lumberjack and god this story is going to have a lot of characters help I don't really have a villain this year per se, just a whole bunch of antagonists in varying shades of sympathetic who basically just all work together to make life really hard and terrible for Keeyon. The most nefarious of them all is actually a group of characters who probably end up saving the day at the end due to shenanigans, so. Doubt if any of them'll get bios. Spoilers. Shhh. |
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Post by Lord Hayati on Oct 15, 2012 16:24:05 GMT -5
is it bad I thought you were writing a NaNoWRiMo on neopets at first?
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Post by Rikku on Oct 15, 2012 20:10:43 GMT -5
ghjsuihg;eegtjg it is so great to read more about this world and these characters and how they fit together and wow basically I am on-the-edge-of-my-seat intrigued and will probably write fanfic
Keeyon is such a complicated and sympathetic protagonist and just, a great protagonist because he's the kind of person that does things, and other things happen in result and just gosh it's gonna be fascinating to read about the messes he gets into
Tyra is slightly intimidating and Jeri is adorable and just gah
<333
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Post by Tam on Oct 15, 2012 23:13:53 GMT -5
is it bad I thought you were writing a NaNoWRiMo on neopets at first? No, not really, they're almost the same characters after all. xD; but beyond the similarities there, this doesn't really have any ties to Neopets. Keeyon is a character who has existed in dozens of different forms since I was 12, and Kiyoshi Paco was just one of them. ghjsuihg;eegtjg it is so great to read more about this world and these characters and how they fit together and wow basically I am on-the-edge-of-my-seat intrigued and will probably write fanficKeeyon is such a complicated and sympathetic protagonist and just, a great protagonist because he's the kind of person that does things, and other things happen in result and just gosh it's gonna be fascinating to read about the messes he gets into Tyra is slightly intimidating and Jeri is adorable and just gah <333 ...adsfjhksj? wow just i am so incredibly glad you are interested in everything so far? i mean on the one hand, mildly surprised, but also REALLY REALLY HAPPY WOW because man this story has given me so much pain over the years (trying to put it together properly and giving up one chapter in more times than i can count argh) but it's also something that's kind of a part of me now and i'm really really determined to do it some degree of justice, so yes thank you <3 ALSO YES, yes thank you, thank god, that is exactly the kind of protagonist he is supposed to be, i want him to be every heroic trope about chosen ones and special talents and great destinies and fate and purpose and meaning all bundled up in a sack and chucked into the ocean because Keeyon is none of that. He isn't special in any way that he doesn't choose to make himself special; he makes decisions and does things and builds his own story out of the ground in a world where the only thing that's expected of him is that he'll do nothing. ...um yeah went off on a tangent there, but that, is basically my goal here, yep (Yesgood, Tyra is supposed to be intimidating, she is supposed to be the type of person that I would REALLY HATE TO BE AROUND WOW at least at first, and Jeri, yes, adorable, yes, good) |
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Post by Tam on Nov 1, 2012 10:08:56 GMT -5
...oh so i guess i should probably start thinking about writing this huh
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