Jump

Way back to right before I started college, I'd been writing a young adult Sci-Fi called The Jump. I wrote 36,000 words of it, but I eventually stopped and can't quite remember why. Part of me really wants to get back into writing it, but I know I'd have to start again from the beginning. I can follow most of the main story line, but it needs tidying up. I think having thirteen chapters written already gives me a highly details plot-line to follow, I just don't have a proper story. The writing isn't as good as what I know I can produce. I was aiming for quantity of words rather than quality, though I did also aim towards creating a world of superpowers and darkness.

The whole book was focusing around darkness. There was so much wrong with the world and so much getting worse that steadily it was turning into a dystopia. That was what I actually wanted, but I think about it enough before writing. I had complex relationships in place without developing them, poor dialogue and the pace was way off. But it's in recognising that that I hope to improve on The Jump, probably this summer between projects.

Part of me wants to scrap the current plot line and do something completely mad - write haphazardly. I'm tempted to make up a board of superpowers and pick them randomly for my characters so that I have no control over who can do what, with the exception of certain key characters. This way, I can avoid having things looking too planned, which was the impression I got very quickly into reading the original chapters back over. I've got access to all sorts of files on superpowers to get a good mix of them - stuff from Heroes, X-Men, and my much mentioned Geneticide, all of which have dozens of abilities to pick from. The different between The Jump and everything else is how I do things with the powers. There's so much possibility in the book that it really can't afford to be a standalone, because it'd be too long.

But I know what I want to do with it. Just now, as I write this, stuff is coming into my head. I need to reconsider this stuff, but I can always do something with this. I may shift around the setting of the book, though I also don't want to overstep into other ideas I've been getting that are a similar sort of genre. For some reason, I can't think of a Young Adult book that isn't fantasy or sci-fi, and most of my older-audience ideas are general fiction, though usually with a bit of a twist.

Anyway, I guess this is just my brief public announcement that I may or may not be writing a teenage fiction book this summer in which the characters have superpowers, and it'll be focused around the same concept as The Jump, because it's a uniquely awesome way of doing this. In my humble opinion.