Hey, my name's Ariane, I'm 13 and I live in Adelaide, Australia.
I've been working on a novel for a quite a while in my spare time, just out of boredom. I've started quite a few beginnings (some even up to 10,000+ words), taken heaps and heaps of notes in my ring-binder that I carry around everywhere, but I'm having a bit of trouble.
Recently I was on holiday in the South of France and was inspired to write (the place is beautiful!). I mapped out all my characters, the plot (but not quite the resolution), the setting, where I want it to begin and so on and so forth. I just don't know what to do.
I've started it, edited it, changed the beginning MILLIONS of times but I just can't get happy. I've tried writing the first chapter then going back and doing the prologue/opening paragraph, but... ugh.
I'll give you a brief overview:
It's an old-fashioned-styled adventure/comic fantasy: a mixture of Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie and Enid Blyton. (Maybe even a bit of Lemony Snicket!). It's meant to be very light-hearted and cheerful, filled with many sorts of creatures such as Whirfidgets, Karden Knomes, Berserker Boggarts and Beaming Flutterchumps (you'll find out about them later on). Three children, who live in a sort of orphanage-slash-boarding school (I promise it's not as cliche as it sounds!) decide to explore the old boarding house's hidden corners when they're stuck inside due to the strange change of weather. In the garrett on the seventh floor, they come across many beautiful, ornate antiques: old gramophones, a chaise lounge, mirrors and hairpins and dusty Venetian masks... you know the sort. But then one of them finds an intricately-carved table lamp which has just one strange oddity about it: it's got wings. (Sounds ridiculous, I know.) Known as a Beaming Flutterchump, the lamp takes them to Magnificious, Realm of the Sortilege (think The Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton), where they come across many peculiar creatures and places. The kingdom is under threat of the Badger Repression - living in the Hildegarde Noir, Adonis Badger is trying to rid the land of humanlings (aka children). A resistance group (The Huggermugger Coterie) send the children on the almighty quest of relinquishing the villain (I haven't completely mapped it out yet...) and the villain's wife, Ursuline, is really the puppeteer behind the marionette, if you know what I mean. Anyway, there are a lot of tricky challenges and places they stop along the way... Scurvy Shwashbucklers, who sail a ship called the Descietful Corsair, and lure animals and people onto their ship so they can feed on their innards... Scabblers, which are members of the SCAB (Society of the Celebrated Adonis Badger)... and a lot of exciting things happen.
It still needs a lot of work.
Here's a bit of an excerpt of what I've got as Ch 1 so far (be prepared for a long read!):
"Tuesday Pepper was a relatively normal thirteen-year-old, with an even amount of limbs and the type of imagination only a child could have, but there was simply something missing. Fortunately, it wasn’t her shadow. She had checked twice already – and besides, being the adventurous sort of person that she was, Tuesday would have been delighted if her shadow had gone astray simply for the fun of having to find it again.
She most certainly hadn’t lost her mind. Although her school teachers were quite often debating whether or not her eccentricity was a good thing, Tuesday was also very clever. She could count to cent soixante-quatre in French and knew the exact spelling for the word Mesopotamia (even though most of the other children in her class, including snotty Florence Biggleton, didn’t).
In actual fact, what dear Tuesday was missing was probably the most horrific thing a child could lose. It was her two parents.
Mr and Mrs Pepper had been skilled cryptozoologists (which is just a fancy term here for someone who searches for creatures that are probably not real and probably do not exist), but had regrettably disappeared when young Tuesday had been just the carefree age of two. They’d been on one of their peculiar expeditions in a place she had never been quite sure the name of.
If you’re as determined an adventure as young Tuesday Pepper was, you’ll know this can be quite a bother – but regardless of this niggling lack of fact, Tuesday had sworn to herself that, one day, she would find them.
After the terrible news of her parents’ disappearance had returned, baby Tuesday had been planted into the home of her incurably-snotty aunt and uncle, Mr and Mrs Mulch, both of whom wouldn’t dare venture within three feet of something diagnosed ‘unsanitary’ let alone a dirty nappy. In turn they placed her in the care of their Scandinavian housekeeper, Astrid. And, as you might expect, Tuesday didn’t grow to love the toffee-nosed old couple – who had decided that they would personally illegalise paprika because it was ‘much too orange’ – but their sixty-eight-year-old, heavily-accen
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