#amwritin

Title: The Paper Round the Worlds

Word count: 71k

Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult, New Adult, Comedy, Adventure

Tropes: Expectation subversion, breaking the fourth wall, going for literally the Wildest thing at All times, Heist, episodic storylines

Pitch: Jennifer Angelica Mary Kate Adams does a paper round...which coincidentally saves the world. But when important magical artifacts start going missing and arguments break out, she suddenly finds herself on a path to save the multiverse.

Ramble: So essentially, this is a highly episodic novel covering the story of Jennifer Angelica Mary Kate Adams as she attempts to perform a Paper Round which goes across multiple dimensions, featuring a variety of weird, wonderful and fantastical residents. Also basically all of them are genderqueer (ft. neopronoun users plural). Also ft. neurodiverse rep and other forms of queerness (including a platonic relationship)

The Beginning: Jennifer takes the first day of her paper round, and is shown around by Michael. He guides her through the rough rules and guidelines for each house and introduces her to the more fantastical residents -- faeries, dinosaur centaurs, twin dwarfs, air spirits, vampires and hellbeasts (who knit with the essence of dying worlds)

The Tea, Sis: After drama at the art therapy group run by the Dinotaurs, twins Felicia and Lucinda start causing trouble, and Jennifer must attempt to keep the peace or run the risk of both their worlds and her own being caught up in the tension. .

The Bluster: A storm hits, increasing the powers of Ron and Bonnie, and Jennifer has to help deal with the minor fallout

The Heist: Jennifer undertakes a dangerous mission to aid the Vamps in retrieving an old medieval textbook from the British Museum.

The Apocalypse: Beryl and Ethel the Hellbeasts accidentally start knitting with the essence of our world after something important goes missing.

The Collection: Everything comes together in the final challenge to save the multiverse

Triggers: body horror (immediately revealed to be non-scary and not sure I'd call it horror? But body fuckery regardless); vampirism and mentions of blood; theft; road accidents (nothing happens beyond a scraped knee and minor shock, victim is on a pushbike and protected); threatened apocalypse; alcohol (not overconsumption or misuse); minor references to bullying

Playlist | Beta Reader Applications (apply by June 12th, Read by August 31st)

List all the things you’re currently working on in as much or little detail as you’d like, then tag some friends to see what they’re working on: writing, art, gifsets, whatever.

I am hopelessly late to this, but much thanks to @flo-lore-writes for tagging me <3

The Paper World Society (Book One of the Ever Soul Quartet)

Status: 81% complete

Counts: 81,957 words and 37 chapters

Blurb: Hikari Matsuda has not always been Hikari Matsuda. In 1996 she was named Glory Noel. In 1970 people called her Fonte Tergat. In 1950 she was Maribel Reyes. She has had thousands of names over thousands of years and thousands of lifetimes. And now, Hikari supposes, she better get ready for a new name.

Hikari has the ability to remember all of her past lives like they were memories from her current life. It’s an ability that’s connected to Hikari's soul itself as it has haunted her through the ages. And in every lifetime for the last three hundred years she has died young. Murdered again and again. Doomed to never live past the age of twenty-five. It's no mystery to Hikari why this happens. Through the memories of one of her previous lives, she has managed to learn the darkest secret of the universe, and there is someone who is ready to kill her every time her soul reincarnates if it means keeping the secret safe.

Then, there is the Paper World Society: a group of people eager to rip the fragile veil that makes up the world around us and exploit the truths of the universe. To them Hikari is an essential tool to save or destroy the world as we know it, and nothing is too extreme if it means achieving that goal. The only thing that stands in there way is the Adonis Network, an equally elusive society that Hikari will have to learn to trust if she wants to live long enough to graduate high school.

Whether Hikari lives or dies, the truth remains the truth. What we see is not all that there is.

The Hollow People (available on Wattpad if you’re interested)

Status: 68% complete

Counts: 68,114 words and 39 chapters

Blurb: Eleni Markova has never felt emotion before: no happiness, no sadness, no anger, and no fear. She is one of the Hollow People, a group that came about a hundred years ago when a virus swept over the world, decimating the population and leaving only a fraction of people uncontaminated. Most of the contaminated died, and the few that recovered from the plague were changed forever. Their genes were altered, and they lost their ability to feel emotion. 

Now, a hundred years after the Hollow Virus, the only remaining human civilization thrives under the leadership of the Hollow People, and Eleni, a member of the City Guard, is a prime example of what a Hollow Person should be. But when terrorists attack the city, Eleni begins to experience what she never believed she could: fear. The foreign emotion runs rampant though her, causing her to flee for her life and abandon her post. 

With the city in chaos, Eleni must either trust her newfound emotions and a con artist named Oliver or let her home be destroyed.

Alright! Tagging time:

The purpose of this class is twofold: For you, the member or guest, it gives a solid grounding in script analysis – how to break down stories, characters, and dialogue, what to look for, and how to create constructive criticism.

Lightning flickered down my arms, dissipating as it flowed, then melted back into my skin.

“Come on!” I said. But getting frustrated would only make it worse.

SPFBO Entry Interview: Richard Writhen "A Host of Ills! #SundayBlogShare #SPFBO #amreading #amediting

I’m back again! I’ll be continuing to post these interviews as I get them in, but I will probably reduce them to twice a week. I’m back at the editing of Counterbalance’s second in the series, which will be taking up the majority of my time.

Today, I bring you an interview I held with Richard Writhen, who entered SPFBO4 with his book A Host of Ills. Down below is the Amazon link. Nothing witty…

It sucks to have your passion be something that consists of sitting or laying down and writing when all you want to do is MOVE. AAAAAH. My brain is running on a million paths, and I wish I was just recording my voice instead of typing because that would be SO MUCH FASTER but then I’d have to like BE A SCRIBE AFTERWORDS and nOwait I got a text from my friend and my extra lives have reloaded on that gaming app and let me just take a few minutes whoops it’s been four hours. So, I have a couple of tips for my fellow adhd writer friends who know the struggle, which can also be useful if you don’t have adhd and you just have trouble procrastinating and focusing!

1. POMODORO METHOD. THIS IS IN CAPS BECAUSE IT CHANGED MY LIFE OKAY I think I already posted about this once, maybe? But gosh, it’s a useful thingy. Basically, you just set up a routine with a timer. You work for twenty minutes, then break for five minutes, then work for twenty minutes, and break for five minutes. During the break you try to leave your computer to give your eyes and your back a break. Do a five minute dance party to get all of the energy out--Goodness knows I neeeed that. After four rounds of this, take a long twenty minute break to do some self care and eat dinner. Normally after four rounds, the task I was working on is completed (i.e. writing a chapter of my wip Heartglass) and so I try to switch tasks. There’s a tooon of pomodoro apps out there. It’s a thing. 2. Exercise first, then write. Pretty straight forward--while you exercise you can listen to some epic music that gets you totally creatively inspired (I love listening to Two Steps From Hell) and it gets all of your excess energy out. Don’t go too hard, because then your brain will melt and not want to do things. 3. Schedule your writing time. Professional authors whose day job is writing have a set writing time, and it takes place during when they’re at their peak mental aptitude. Even though writing is their job, they don’t often force themselves to do it more than four or five hours a day unless they’re crunched for a deadline. They have figured out through trial and error when they write best--some writers like midnight, others like myself are much better if they do it in the morning. 9 AM is my favorite time of day to get started on my WIP. Set a time that will make your creative brain excited to get started on your work, and then stick to it! 

4. Reward yourself for completing goals. When you’re trying to write a novel, looking ahead at that huge chunky goal of 80,000 words makes your completed 2000 words for that day look like nothing, even though writing 2000 words in one day is frikkin awesome! I like to buy a bread bowl with chicken noodle soup on campus on Fridays if I’ve written 2000 words every day that week. It’s a good time. I loveeee bread bowls.

5. IF YOUR BRAIN WANTS YOU TO DO ALL OF THE THINGS, IT’S OKAY. Tame that brain! So, one of my struggles in writing is that I hate that I can’t write five stories at the exact same flipping time. I’ll be writing my modern Beauty and the Beast short story while wishing I could drop it for the dark creepy clownpunk idea that sounds SO AWESOME that just popped into my head. And if I lose interest in one of my WIPs, that’s bAD, because now I have to either figure out whether to drop it or keep it clutched desperately for a year, hoping to get inspired for it again. I’ve decided what works best for me is that, using the pomodoro technique, I’ll work on my current WIP for twenty minutes, then use the five minute break to write down the idea I just had and work on it, and then put working on it on my never ending list of tasks. It gives me incentive to work through all of my other tasks and it makes sure I don’t ever forget those awesome ideas. 

6. IF A SCENE IN YOUR ROUGH DRAFT IS BORING YOU, SKIP IT. Just. JUST DO IT. It’s sooo much better than stopping writing. Leave a note or a comment to yourself and then you can come back and fix it later!