Travelers Through Worlds

So, I've recently noticed a recurring theme throughout my more recent stories, and I find the differences and similarities fascinating. I kind of wonder what it says about me, but all of these stories involve a relatively average teenaged girl, travelling to a different world, and discovering something.

Some of you will (hopefully) recognize The Old House, and it's every-girl protagonist Sara Kelly, so I figured we may as well start there and work in reverse chronological order.
I'll give you some stuff about the character, a brief description of the other world, and a paragraph or two about the character's experience there.

*

The Old House 

The Character: Sara Elissabeth Kelly, age 15

The Other World: A totally different steampunk world where some people have clocks for faces, and crime is rampant.

Interesting Fact: Sara is the only one of my "travelers" without a love interest. ALthough, throughout the whole story, she is helping to rescue Lydia's fiance.

My favorite excerpt:

She gestured at Sara’s beat up lime green high tops which her best friends had all signed at the end of year nine instead of her year book. Katy’s signature was the biggest. She had written it with a big black sharpie, covering half of Sara’s left shoe. She wished that she had tucked her phone into Katy’s clothes before they left, but it was still in the pockets of Sara’s carefully ripped jeans at Katy’s house. 

It probably wouldn’t work anyway, she thought.  She still had no freakin’ idea where she even was, beyond room 17 at Rennal’s Inn and Tavern. She was being dressed like a doll by criminals, in a strange inn filled with clock-people and murderers behind a magical door. That’s it! She thought angrily, I’m going home, grumpy old lady or not!

Searching For Solace

The Character: Solace Estragón, age 16

The Other World: Several different chemical induced "lucid dreams" created by the character herself in a sci-fi hospital.

Interesting Fact: Originally, I had imagined Solace as Indian (as you can kind of see on the cover I made), although as I was writing, she sort of became Hispanic, and a scene about her mom's Mexican hot chocolate is one of my favorites in this travesty of a NaNoWriMo. I guess sometimes characters write themselves.

My favorite excerpt:

“That’s the most elegant Architect Haze I’ve ever seen,” whispered Coles, full of awe. “She’s made herself God.”

And she was, swirling and turning, gliding along, making her own world. Every movement, mirrored by new life springing up behind her, in a dance of creation.

Suddenly, she stopped moving, she stood still with her arms reached over her head. Noah and Coles thought the screen had frozen. After a few seconds, a low buzzing noise started up, and a slow smile crept onto Solace’s face. 

The buzzing grew louder, and they saw that it was coming from a fleet of approaching helicopters. Solace sat down, still smiling, and the helicopters opened fire.

The helicopters fired relentlessly, it looked like chaos, but Solace knew better.

They shot down the first tree Solace had made, until it was a flaming pile of timber, and then moved onto to the one directly next to it.

The bombs rained down, copying Solace’s dance exactly, horribly following every twist and turn she had made. 

Her garden was a beautiful maze, of swirls and bends, and the helicopters set every blade of grass on fire in the exact order they had been created. 

It wasn’t chaos. It was order at it’s finest.

The Boy With Violet Eyes

The Character: Adelie Rennal, age 14

The Other World: A mirror image of her own world, although the people who inhabit it are very different than in her world.

Interesting Fact: You may recognize Adelie from The Old House (although Sara's excerpt up there doesn't have her in it, she is a main character there as well. I created her for my first NaNo, in which she is a boring, meek, mary sue with pretty much no redeeming value except her faith. when I started The Old House, I "recycled" her, so she could have some redemption for the utter mouse she is here.

My favorite excerpt:

I sigh and look out the window to the place where I saw the boy two days ago, and at the setting sun, and he appears.

He doesn't walk to the spot, he literally materializes before my eyes.

I shakily add to my diary:

The Boy with the violet eyes stands in the alley. I watch him through my bedroom window, and he is eternal. He looks my age, but his amaranthine eyes tell another story all together. He looks a thousand times wiser than Aunt Luelle and her verses from the Book of Creation, and I, Adelie Rennal of Ceruli City, Ceruli will meet him tonight.

I shut my book and stuff it in the waistband of my bloomers under my nightgown. I run to the window. He’s still there.

I throw open the window and climb out onto the apple tree, and promptly fall out trying to climb down.

Err.. Yeah, um so...

I'm not going to lie to you.
I've been extremely busy doing absolutely nothing.

My Dad's been off work for the holidays, and in fact, just went back today. Several times I have thought of writing a post, and then had an "OOH! Internet!" moment. so, sorry.

I will now tell you some stuff.

• I dyed my hair blue, except it's really more bluish blackish. here, have a picture:
• I turned 15! I guess you probably figured that out... I had a couple friends over, and we stayed up all night watching movies and learning dirty words in french. No I won't tell you any of them. I will tell you that we watched Labyrinth and Mrs. Doubtfire.
• I got some really cool stuff for the holidays. 
• I am now in possession of a stuffed owl named Watson. If you want to know why his name is Watson, I'll tell you the same thing I told my mom and Jayne: Because Holmes isn't a very good name for an owl.
• I'm working on a new story. Ish. at the moment I'm really just coming up with the world, and possibly putting way to much into it.
• I'm starting a psychology class this semester.
• I didn't shower today. 

Uh.. I think you're caught up now. 

So, I can't think of anything else to write, so I'll give you an excerpt of the main book I've been working on (I'm determined to finish it before the year is over. I've got some time.), a cute picture of Watson, and maybe a crudely drawn picture of a duck.  Because I'm like that.

OK, story:

(This is from a chapter that I pretty much wrote for myself. It's really sweet, but it has almost zero relevance unfortunately.)

Three a.m, and Lydia Winnoway is crying on her bed.

She’s crying because she’s afraid.

She’s afraid that the King’s Guards, those silk cloaked little bastards, will catch James. She’s afraid that one day, he’ll be late, because he’s not coming home. That’s why she yelled at him. Because she didn’t know where he was.

It’s been rough lately for Lydia. Her aunt Muriel is won’t stand for Lydia even being around James- and not because he’s a thief. If she knew what Lydia has been hiding from her-and James-she would be beyond furious.

Lydia is almost sure she's pregnant. 

Aunt Muriel isn’t the only person who would hate a half clockface baby, even a blood relation. Lydia has seen babies left on the steps of houses. Even left at the inn.

No child can grow up at the inn. Not surrounded by people like her and James.  She knows this from experience. 

The door creaks open.

“Lydia? Are you awake?”

It’s James.

“Yeah,” Lydia whispers.

James sits on the bed next to her and wraps his arm around her shoulders. She brushes his cheek, her fingers glancing across his hour hand.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you, I was just worried.”

“I deserved it, Love. But I don’t think the whole bar needed to know.”

Lydia laughed and wiped away her tears. “Next time I’ll yell at you in private then.”

“Agreed.”

Lydia chuckles at that.

James loves her so much. Every time he looks at her, he wonders what she’s doing with a wanted  clockface criminal when she could have kings and gods bowing down to her. 

He’s been in love before, sure, but never the way he loves Lydia. 

She reminds him of the fairytales his Cousin Meghan used to tell him. Stories about a princess who ran away to slay a dragon, and never brushed her raven black hair.

Sure, there may be a lot less dragons around the inn then on the floating kingdom of Frisk, and Lydia’s locks may be a tangle of sandy curls, but the fierce look in her eye, and her easy laugh are things James never thought he would find anywhere besides stories.

Watson. Isn't he frickin' ADORABLE? Seriously, I'm hugging him as I write.

8-15: The Old House

Wow, time has flown.
Anyways, today I want to share a part of the book I'm writing. It's called The Old House, and it's about a girl named Sara Kelly who travels to... actually, I'm not gonna tell you, you'll have to keep reading! :)

Sara and Katy had finally gotten to sleep around two in the morning. They had been chattering all night in an effort to “pack every drop of summer full of amazingness,” as Katy had said.

But rest was short lived, as Sara woke to somebody shaking and poking her at four twenty-seven precisely.

She rolled over sleepily and mumbled, “Katy?”

Katy hit Sara’s shoulder with a pillow.

“Shush! Do you want my mum to wake up?”

Sara sat up and rubbed her eyes.

“Why on earth did you wake me up?” she demanded.

Katy gave a suspicious smile (curiously similar to the one Sara had gotten from Josh Mason earlier), and Sara noticed for the first time that she was dressed in all black.

“Katy, what’s going on?” Sara asked seriously.

“I’ll tell you when we get there! Now put these on!” She said throwing dark clothing at Sara.

 . . .

Sara smacked Katy’s shoulder. Hard.

They were standing in front of Church Cottage.

It looked especially ominous with the weak moonlight illuminating the mist around them in the cold night.

Hell would freeze over before Sara was going inside that creepy old house.

Tell the devil to grab some snow boots, Sara thought miserably as she and Katy stepped through the door.

The inside of Church Cottage was warmer than the crisp summer night, but it was to dark to see.

Katy pulled out her bag and Started rummaging while Sara fumbled for a light switch, but didn’t find anything.

Just as her eyes were getting somewhat used to the lack of light, Sara’s vision was flooded with brightness, as Katy found her flashlight and turned it on.

Katy grinned like an idiot and said, “Shall we have a look around?”

Sara was about to shout at the top of her lungs that she was leaving right this instant and that if Katy had any sense she’d come back too, but instead she heard herself say (somewhat breathless and shakily)

“Okay.”

The house was amazingly well kept on the inside. 

The paint was a bit flaky, and the rooms were almost totally empty of furniture, but it was cozy, and the photos on the walls were still mostly all right, but some of them were a bit bizarre.

Sara’s favorite was a picture of a girl a little older than herself in a victorian portrait. The strange thing was that she was sharing the photograph with a particularly elaborate grandfather clock. The top of the clock looked oddly like a crown.

Katy found a painting of someone with a clock for a head.

Sara would never ever admit it, but she was having fun snooping around the cottage and pointing out strange pictures, and was kind of sad when they had looked through all the rooms.

 “Well not all of them,” Katy had remarked.

There was only one room in the entire house that was locked, and it happened to be the most interesting.

The door was in the hallway. It was painted crimson red, and had the number “8281” engraved elaborately into it.

Katy said it was probably just another bedroom, but Sara wasn’t so sure.

She loved to read about all those old houses with secret passages and secret doors, and thought it would be utterly fantastic to live right near one.

“Sara, I’m gonna go look at the portraits again, that door freaks me out,” Katy whispered barely audible, “I think it’s locked for a reason.”

Sara shrugged.

“I’ll stay here.”

Katy Ran off as if she were being chased. She had seemed really scared of the locked door, where as Sara felt she was sort of drawn to it.

Sara jiggled the handle again, just to make sure it really was locked. The handle didn’t budge.

She sighed and leaned against the door.

It creaked open, like something that hadn’t been moved in twenty years.

Sara reminded herself, that it probably hadn’t.

Sara poked her head through the door.

It was a sitting room, painted the color of banana pudding. There was a crackling fire in the fireplace.

Hanging on the mantlepiece was a photo of a young woman looking extremely cross at whoever was taking it.

Sara froze.

There was somebody in the house.

Sara stepped into the room and the door slammed closed behind her.

“Lydia? Is that you I hear? You’ve been gone nearly a week, you impetuous little freeloader!” a woman’s voice yelled out.

Sara ran back to the door and started pushing on it furiously, trying to open it before the woman realized she was there.

“Lydia Winnoway, if you think you can sneak about like this! If you think I don’t know you’ve been off with that… that ticker on one of those flying machines, you are sorely mistaken!”

The voice was closer now.

“When my brother and his mettlesome wife died, I swore I would protect their only child! I seriously doubt they meant for you to…”

She broke of as she rounded the corner into the living room and saw Sara.

The woman was a short plump old lady in a floral dress covered in flour, her steel-gray hair was tightly coiled into two buns on either side of her head. She was carrying a spatula covered in something sticky.

“Who the hell are you?” the woman asked with an odd mix of shock and general grumpiness on her wrinkly face.

“Er, Sara, Sara Kelly”

“What are you doing in my house?”

“I didn’t mean to be! I came in from Church Cottage!”

“Oh course you did, and I’m King Christopher!” She tried to whack Sara with her gooey spatula. Sara ducked and ran for it. She rushed through the rooms of the unfamiliar house while the lady chased her.

“You rascals always trying to break in here! Well, you go back and tell whoever you work for that Muriel Winnoway’s private belongings don’t belong to no-one! No-one, nohow!” 

Muriel picked up Sara by the scruff of her neck and threw her out the door.

“And if you see that no good niece of mine give ‘er this!” The old lady spit on Sara’s face and slammed the door.