New Work in Progress…

I’m focusing on a new writing project, WIP name Folds.  It’s contemporary YA fantasy about three friends (yes, that again) who grow up together in an imaginary small suburb of Boston, living mostly normal lives in between teleporting from coast to coast, filling a nearby forest with life forms of their own creation, and working with the government to fight off an implacable alien horde. 

You mean sort of like Harry Potter meets Puppet Masters?

Typical slice-of-life, coming of age story, in short.  One of them travels through time. Another one lives in a cathedral. The third one moved away and none of them wanted her to go.

I didn’t write much say much about Knave while I was writing it, out of superstition or whatever, but I’m going to post a bit about Folds while it’s coming-to-be.

In planning Folds I’m trying several things that I didn’t in Knave:

  1. Third person limited voice.  I loved doing the shifting first-person POV in Knave, especially when my narrators were all in the same room at the same time trying to figure out what the others are doing.  First person is tough, though.  I had originally intended to alternate between two narrators, but then I needed to show what the King was up to. One of my narrators couldn’t get into the castle, and the other one lived there but was deaf and couldn’t hear what was going on, so I wound up adding a third narrator.  That was really good, in the end, as the third POV character eventually became my favorite, and even wound up taking over the ending of the book, but… I’d like to play with a different set of challenges this time.
  2. Lots of really short chapters.  Knave is eleven chapters and 72K words, so an average chapter is more than six thousand words.  Chapters in Folds are shorter units, averaging a little more than a thousand words. 
  3. Contemporary setting and the challenges of normal life (school life, parents, boyfriends and girlfriends, college,careers) as well those of as fantasy life (getting to San Francisco when you’re twelve and only have a couple of hours to spare, fighting implacable alien hordes, etc.). 
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