I have a little notebook devoted to this writing project, and I especially love the freedom it gives me to not worry about taking up page-space with drawings alongside words - because that's what this paper is for. I have deemed it so.
As of late, I have been particularly taken with Leine Baker, my main character Sadie Leblanc's best friend. She's a mashup of a few people I know and love dearly in my personal life, so I especially like writing about her. She's a complicated character, but a sweetheart nonetheless.
↑ an unfinished drawing (currently only of Sadie's upper-half, but soon will be of Leine as well) that will take up most of the page, and I will write around. I enjoy that specific format, though I also enjoy writing first and filling in empty areas with doodles after. Both are fun.
That is all. I mostly just wanted to show the cute buttons I glued to the cover of the notebook. Isn't it a pretty shell? I seek to make the inside match its outer loveliness.
Writing project | Short story | Original character
Length ≈ 650 words
♡
Ame-Lee Gray wasn't fond of words.
He found them nearly useless, and preferred to view the world through images.
Colours.
Shapes.
Things that could be seen and felt, not just stupid language. It seemed all so restricting to him. Which explained why Ame loved to spend his alone time holed up in his room with a cheap canvas and local dollar store paints, speaking through the brush.
Ame was an odd sort of weird that seemed to draw people toward him instead of repel them. His peers were more often intrigued than unsettled. However, it was Ame's lack of communication skills that hindered him from having many friends. So despite many of the few kids his age taking interest in him, he spent most of his time by himself.
At least, that was until she came along.
Persephone was her name. Persephone Thompkins.
Two words that caught his interest almost immediately.
Almost.
It was the summer before ninth grade when they moved in just down the block from the Gray's. As always when someone moved into the small town, there was much welcoming by different families. His was one of them, though Ame wouldn't be caught dead volunteering to assist his mom in what he viewed as excessive help.
That whole summer, he'd never even known she existed.
Then school inevitably began.
He'd been sitting at the front of class in a desk by the window, blocking out the pre-class chatter of his peers and scratching graphite into the desktop in random, jagged patterns. They weren't random to him, though -- no, they were his feelings visualized. And he was not feeling pleasantly that early September morning.
His older sister had started an argument, shoved him, and - certainly not by any "lack of coordination" on his part, as Lumei had claimed - he fell and scraped his elbow. It still hurt like hell, and the cotton inside of his sleeve was rubbing--
"Ame-Lee," the voice of his teacher, Mrs. Leblanc, rang out sternly, jolting him upright from where he'd been hunched over his desk. His eyes left his pencilled markings.
And there she was: a girl he'd never seen before standing at the front of the class, just a few metres away from him.
Curls.
Such perfect black curls hung down past her shoulders. There were a few people in town with curly hair, but always frizzy, always a vast, messy array of shapes clumped together. Never so...
Defined. It almost unnerved him.
Mrs. Leblanc spoke once more, turning to face the girl. "Introduce yourself again, now that everyone is listening." She shot Ame a look at the word everyone, but his eyes were focused on the curly haired girl. She adjusted her glasses subtly, glancing from student to student.
"My name's Persephone Thompkins."
Ame had never cared for words. Those two burned themselves in his brain, however, as he assigned the shape of her face to them.
As any normal person would after learning someone's name, of course.
Obviously.
"But," she continued, a hand going up to adjust her glasses again, "I go by Percy."
Ame didn't hear that last part at first, because the moment she said the nickname her eyes found his, and his auditory processing somehow lagged.
Dark brown, he knew, but they looked black.
Same as his. And nothing like his.
Down-turned and slightly sunken. A sort of tired gaze, held within the thin frames of her steel-wired glasses.
Framed like a painting.
And she kept adjusting those frames with her right-- no, left hand. Warm tan tones and neatly maintained nails, repositioning the glasses on the bridge of her nose as if trying to hang a canvas on a wall, shifting it over and over because you just couldn't seem to get it hanging straight.
Then his hearing caught up as she walked through the rows to get to an empty desk at the back. The word echoed in his ears -- Percy.
Ame didn't hold onto words. They were nothing more than meaningless, impractical, redundant language. In fact he absolutely sucked at remembering the simplest words, including names. He'd just mentally tag people by an image of their face as opposed to word labels like names.
But that word?
He twirled his pencil around, began erasing the harshly drawn shapes from his desk as Mrs. Leblanc began to teach, and promised himself that he would remember it.
And her best friend's boyfriend's cousin's best friend:
And her best friend's boyfriend's cousin's best friend's little brother:
And her best friend's boyfriend's cousin's best friend's little brother's crush:
And a beautiful, rustic white house on a hill overlooking the town and river! Looks like it will be an easy, slow, relaxing finish to his highschool years...
(spoiler: it will not be.)
Scrapy summary:
“Everything is tradition in the small northern town of Kamp Reverie; something even the most rebellious of children are taught to respect. But change is pushed onto the town when a family from the big city - the first to come into the town in decades - move into the long-abandoned 'white house on the hill.' What began as small murmurs eventually grows to a roar among the youth as they rally to make changes to the systems that no longer work for the children who long for freedom and a future in areas previously considered unfitting or inappropriate by the community.”
Genres: romance, adventure, slice-of-life,
mystery, supernatural, young adult
Tropes: found family, friends→lovers, underdog,
slow-burn, amateur sleuth, first love,
highschool-sweethearts, teenage dirtbags
This is the latest of my two current writing projects, and very different from my first! Does it seem interesting?
