I'm Writing a Book... anyone else?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I’m taking all the aspects of the first run Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books that struck me (whether good or bad) as a kid and inserting them into our modern, complicated young adult world.

I’ve got a large arc planned, divided into four adventures of about seventy pages each. The first adventure is done and I started the second adventure yesterday. I plan to build to a climax in the fourth adventure by having the audience finally get to see the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boy techniques properly culminate into an adventure.

Each previous adventure story fails just slightly at being a proper adventure for strange modern reasons, done in a way that, I hope, leaves the audience wringing their hands in frustration. I want the power in the final adventure not to come from the adventure itself, but from the feeling of nostalgic satisfaction the audience will feel after being so narrowly and strangely denied it three times already.

Gee, can you tell I’m excited about this?

42

In theory, I’m rewriting an earlier story to tighten up some plot problems. In practice, I haven’t touched it for a while.

The book is set in the deep future, on a planet that almost managed a couple centuries ago to bomb itself back to the Stone Age. My main protagonist is a shy, geeky young man, who was living a fairly boring life on his family’s farm until he happened to be the first person to meet a group of visitors from a neighboring, and far more advanced, colony. His friendship with them, particularly with their general humanities expert (who’s more than old enough to be his mother), not only helps him with his own troubled mind but allows him to see problems in his own society for the first time.