New Writing Projects (ish).

*WARNING: The following content is full of insufferable whining and jerky behavior. I tried to put all the worst parts in the footnotes, but I failed. BE WARNED AND PROCEED WITH CAUTION*

So back in April I wrote a post on this blog about all of the stories that I was currently working on. Only one of those books is currently still on my work list, and so I thought I'd update it a bit, just so you're in the loop. Because I love all of you guys.

But before I begin, I'll just start right off and say that I didn't crop the photos like in the last post, because I post these stories on Figment and I can just crop them there, without the photos becoming pixelated and grainy--if that makes any sense.

The quotes underneath the covers are from the synopses-es found on my Figment page.

1. The Glass Girl

The font used are Bell MT and Sunshine in my Soul.

The world has turned to glass. Everything is smooth, colors pinks and whites and lavenders. Lea collects small people, making terrariums for them back at her house.

This is my Camp NaNo project, and it's the story of a girl (and also a boy) who live in the world after it's all turned to glass. It's set in Topeka, Kansas (with a smattering of Colorado Springs), because I've been to both places and so the setting is natural to me.*

In this novel there are skeletons and magic and tea and the color orange, automatons, miniature people, and also a fair amount of reading. 

I think this book has a lot of potential--more potential, than, say, that awful book I wrote last year that was a dystopian. **

I also think this book is odd, to say the least. It's definitely different (as in, the plain girl does not fall in love with any hot, perfect guys), and so I'm wondering if it will ever be published. I'm not willing to make it any more boring than it already is--it's set in Kansas, land of the flat and dry--and so maybe I'll have to self publish it or something. But I'd rather not do that, and so I'm leaning on the traditional way.

Either way, I want to see this baby in print. Hardcover form, please.

2. Mermaidens

The font used is Bell MT.

Living in the seaside town of Klarine, there is a girl named Charlotte, and she holds a deep secret: she is a mermaid.

Yes, I was working on this book in the last post I made about my current works in progress, except for the fact that the plot has changed so dramatically from the last draft you couldn't recognize the similarities in it (also, the cover changed. Here's a gold star for noticing!). I will now list quite a few things that went wrong while writing the first 8K words of the first draft.

• The twin sisters were hard to write, even though they've sort of remained in the current draft. But they did seem to hate each other before I scrapped them up. Plus, they were so different from each other. One was shy and cried a lot (my main character) and the other was outgoing, snarky, and downright rude. 
• On the topic of my main character, I'd like to add that she wasn't strong enough to carry the story on her shoulders. She was far too fragile, and in about the fifth chapter, I broke her (there will  now be a future blog post on how you can break your characters). Her name was Leila, if that gives you a hint as to her character.
• Too much happened in too little time. 
• The pacing was terrible. 

And now, a list of things that stayed the same throughout:

• Calvin's name--and, for the most part, his character. Only, he's considered insane by everyone... except he actually isn't.
• Minos, the big black draft horse. 
• Water. There's definitely water, somewhere. 

 

3. The Sheep Watch

The font used is Garamond.

Leonard watches for wolves one night while tending to his sheep. But when he hears a noise in the apple orchard, he follows it and meets the incredible Penny Keaton.

The Sheep Watch is a contest entry for the Defy the Dark contest, and it's about a boy named Leonard who falls asleep while watching his flock of sheep one night, and when he wakes up he meets this girl named Penny, who is intentionally a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (a pretty, young, perfect girl who is put into the story to alter the course of a man's life. See: Margo in Paper Towns and Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451).

It's probably one of the lighter things I've written; the death count tolls in at only one victim! A huge success!***

Plus, it's finished. So I'm not exactly working on it anymore. I figured I'd just announce that it exists or something. 

Footnotes:

* Mom, you may remember that I paid an awful lot of time trying to spot the top of the Capitol building while passing through Topeka on our way to the book signing. I consider this "novel research." I've noticed that there are a lot of trees in that city, though--trees that I sort of forgot about while writing the first 30K words. REVISION TIME.

** And speaking of dystopian... this new book is not one of those. Not. Yes, it is, for the most part a post-apocalyptic novel. But it does not take place in the future, and there aren't any guns or knives or swords in it--and there is also no instance where an incredibly hot boy falls in love with an average, plain girl *cough cough Divergent and Delirium cough cough*.

*** Of course, this sentence has led to a ten-minute long math problem while I deduce how many characters I kill per story, on average. The grand total: 5.3. I had to guesstimate for my novels that I haven't finished yet, but I believe the number is pretty accurate.