And guess what? It's CHICK LIT! :D Best type of book everrr, even though romance hasn't really started blooming yet. (That's because...I dunno...I don't want to give it away? Actually, it's because I had trouble wrapping up Chapter 3. That's why.)
Yeah, so I'm taking a break from The Eleventh (even though I need to finish the second book) because The Eleventh got so wrapped up in my senior year...I need a break from it, too. I'll finish the draft of the second by the end of the year, and maybe get started on the third if I can (NaNo '09?)...but for now...noooooo. I'm writing harmless chick lit. :P I'm almost 10,000 words in, and although I don't have any outline written (which has me kind of freaking out) I have a good idea of where it's gonna go.
With the exception, of course, of the next few scenes. I think it's going to end up being kind of like Highness in the sense that the first draft is gonna SUCK due to its flailing-about nature, but hopefully it'll be salvageable. Maybe even enjoyable? I'm trying to get a spunky-type female narrator-thing going, since that's what contemporary chick lit is all about. Hopefully I'm succeeding.
Oh, and it's based off of my own experiences (haha, no). It's about a girl named Wendy Phillips who has an overactive imagination that ends up sucking her into movie plots as she watches them, in particular one movie: an action-adventure fantasy type called Glass Flower that stars her best friend's celeb crush. But the guy Wendy ends up falling for isn't the actor her friend adores, but the character himself - the standard charming action hero with the weird name, Cain Leafheart. But Wendy ends up learning that falling in love with someone who's just in her head has more problems than solutions, especially when she begins to lose the overactive imagination that gave her Prince Charming in the first place.
I either want to call it "Overactive Imagination" or "In Your Head"...or something else. I'm having trouble coming up with a title I like. :/ Oh well. I'll call it Overactive Imagination for tagging purposes...even though it's currently In Your Head in the document version. Heheh...working title, much?
But yeah...maybe I'll post the Prologue through Chapter Three here! :) Just for fun. Like a preview! Haha, yeah, I'll do that. (But I'm going to be lazy and not transfer over the italics...because I'm lazy. Hehe, sorry.) Here is the unedited first draft prologue...:
Prologue
I have always had an overactive imagination. It was just something that was a part of me - I personally always blamed it on being an only child with two parents working full-time. Plus, there being three of us, I was sometimes the odd one out. (Yeah, three-way conversations? They don't work.)
So, when my parents were out and I was stuck at home with a babysitter or at that after school program they signed me up for every year, I usually just had to dream up my own adventures to have. It wasn't to say that I didn't have friends, because I totally did. I was actually a really social kid, not "Miss Popular", but high enough up the social ladder to never be in a situation without someone I could be friendly with.
It was just that a lot of times, I was stuck in a situation where either I was by myself, or everyone else around me wasn't being as friendly as they could have been. (This happened a lot if my parents had to drag me to a company dinner or a dinner party with their friends, and I was surrounded by boring adults who would ask me my name, age, and what I wanted to be when I grew up before ignoring me completely.) So I had to make do with what I had, and what I had was my imagination.
It started out innocently enough. First, I had basic imaginary friends. I never had a consistent imaginary friend, I just used whatever was around me. Sometimes it was a stuffed animal, sometimes it was an action figure, and sometimes it was a cloud up in the sky. Then, once I got older and could imagine things in my head, I would think up vague shapes of people to talk to. Eventually, they became clearer and ended up developing personalities, and I sifted through my very large collection until I found a few characters that seemed interesting enough to keep imagining up everyday.
Then I started getting into reading books, seeing movies, and every now and then playing a video game. That, as it turned out, was a mistake just waiting to happen.
As it turned out, my imagination on its own was completely harmless. No matter how real anything was when I imagined it up, it wasn't...you know. Real. It was just a tiny little figment of my imagination that I could throw away at a moment's notice.
But, apparently, my imagination worked synergistically with other people's imaginations. If a book was imaginative enough, suddenly I found myself staring at a vague shape that resembled the main character or villain, and they would only go away once I closed the book. It was the same with games - characters would begin to interact with me outside the screen, only leaving me alone if I turned the console off.
Movies were the worst - as soon as I started watching a movie, it was like I was in the movie. Sometimes my interpretation of the movie plot would end up drastically different than whoever I watched it with because I ended up basically seeing a different movie. (Apparently, adding just one character - namely me - could potentially change a movie from a sad ending to a happy one, as demonstrated when I single-handedly saved both Romeo and Juliet when I saw the 1968 film.) Heck, sometimes I ended up seeing a different movie if I watched the movie a second time.
But it only happened to me, and nothing that happened in the movie was permanent. I think I got killed once when I watched the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and I was fine when the movie ended. That was always what happened - the movie would end, I would wake up from my movie trance, and everything would be normal again. It just made it unbelievably awkward to watch movies with people, since if they turned to talk to me during the movie, I wouldn't respond. In fact, I'd usually just stare up at the screen, my mouth open a little bit, looking a bit like I was about to have a seizure (that was how one of my friends, Nellie, described it).
I mean, it wasn't really much of a problem. I just avoided watching movies, if I could. In class, if we were going to watch a movie, I'd usually find some way to convince my teachers I had to go to the bathroom, health office, library, computer lab, lockers, or, once, across the street for coffee. And some movies weren't even worth trying to get out of, so I'd just watch them anyway. (If it got bad, sometimes I could close my eyes and avoid getting sucked into it.) I also learned that if I avoided big screens and dark viewing rooms, I could "snap out of it" much easier - so movie theaters became off-limits to me. I didn't care, though, since I had enough luck to land a group of friends that put shopping and trips to the beach before movies.
Really, though, it wasn't anything I ever had to tell anyone. It was just an overactive imagination that didn't go away when I hit puberty, like all my friends. So I kept it all through high school, and as I entered my senior year, I had just sort of gotten used to it.
Unfortunately, that was the year my overactive imagination got the better of me.
Which really sucked, because I had to focus on college apps and not failing my calculus class.
But whatever - it was nothing I, Wendy Yui Nakamura-Phillips, couldn't handle.
(Except the calculus thing. Oh my god, derivatives. HOW DO YOU DO THEM?)
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