NaNoWriMo 2014: From Heaven To Hell/Hydrena

Time for another story about a story idea!

When I was maybe 13, 14, 15 years old, I spent a lot of my time on a website called FictionPress.Net, posting stories and talking to people in the forums. The site users used to start informal writing competitions among themselves, and I took part in two. The second is irrelevant (at least for now), but the first involved starting your story with a short passage which ran thusly:

"Stop, you thief!" Panting frantically, I ran down the escalator from the heavily puffing security guard. I clutched the pack of cigarettes tightly in my hand as I made my jump to freedom – crashing into someone. I looked up to find myself staring into a Goth boy's green eyes.

I'm not sure if this was from something, or if the girl who started the contest just made it up; if I've just infringed some sort of copyright thing, I didn't mean to and I'm sorry.

From this passage, I developed a modern fantasy story about a girl who discovered a new world and a new race (by means of the green-eyed Goth boy, who was a part of this race), and ended up having to confront Death himself, and I called this story From Heaven To Hell. I made it up as I wrote it, so the plotline was a bit dubious, and what kind of character gets transported to another realm by some guy she literally just ran into and doesn't ask where she is or what the hell just happened, I don't know. But it was one of the few stories that I actually finished at that age, and despite the fact that my two main characters didn't have much personality-wise (much like the rest of my characters - guess who couldn't be bothered with character development when they were 14), they stayed with me.

I mentioned in my post about The Dragon Story that I have a habit of merging story ideas together, and so when I realised during the early stages of planning Barnabus' Balloons that I would want some sort of magical race in my story, instead of creating a new magical race, I decided to steal the one from From Heaven To Hell, thus linking the story ideas. I also mentioned that I had created a network of sequels, prequels and companion books. Barnabus' Balloons is to be the first in the main series, which will consist of four books, and From Heaven To Hell, which I am renaming Hydrena while I rewrite it during this month's NaNoWriMo with a better plotline and more developed characters, is to be the last, while The Dragon Story is to be the third. I am also planning a prequel and have numerous over ideas which I may or may not ever write.

So Hydrena - the rewrite of From Heaven To Hell - is what I am writing at the moment. We are ten days into NaNoWriMo now and unsurprisingly I am very behind (both with writing and with my uni work, but that is neither related nor the point). You want proof? Fine.

However, I am not the only one doing NaNoWriMo at my university, and we have got permission to have an overnight write-in at our library soon, so as long as I don't continuously forget to write until then, I should be able to catch up. :)