I’ve been hard at work editing Seeking Utopia, the first novel in a three part series about a girl who discovers the cracks throughout the world can lead to other dimensions. It’s a huge project and I absolutely love my story and characters. Because I hope to start to query agents with this manuscript in the next few months, I had planned to work on a Death Note fanfiction for NaNo this year.
But then, I was struck hard by an original story idea. I thought of the title before I’d even figured out the base of the plot.
I call it FanFact.
I intended this novel to have a very basic premises, which is that a fangirl in love with a book series finds her way into the world. While there she runs into the two main characters, Liam and Blane, characters she ships as a couple. This would result in a lot of humor and awkward interactions as these characters discover that first off, they are characters, and second off, that a lot of people want them to be together romantically.
This idea quickly grew, however. For my main character to be obsessed with a series, I had to create the series. I began with some very basic world building, which grew into pages of small details that I knew would never be in the main story. I’ve always wanted to write some sort of novel involving magic, but I had always felt too self-conscious to. I’m a huge fan of Harry Potter and I didn’t want that to bleed into my own work.
But my magical world was very different. The schooling system was much different, the type of magic was different, and the people were different. And after all this world building just writing a story about a girl interacting with characters seemed mundane.
So now, FanFact is a novel about my main character delving into this “fiction” world, meeting these characters, and becoming part of the plot of the book series itself. I don’t want to give too much away as I am only 11,000 words into the story, but I am loving the main plot as well.
And don’t worry, I am keeping the gay boys as a sub-plot! I’d never get rid of shipping, haha.
Something I really want to do with this book is address the topic of queer-baiting. Obviously I can’t discuss it head on, but characters in books and media are often written with these hints of romance that never come to pass, leading to tons of fanfiction. Don’t get me wrong, I love fanfiction. I’ve written hundreds of stories. Queer-baiting as an issue is complicated for me, because in some ways I enjoy it and in some ways I hate it. Maybe I’ll do a whole post on that topic another day. But either way, it is a topic I’d like to play with, and my lovely gay wizards are a great way to do that.
In recent years, media about fans of media has become a bit more prevalent, but it is far from mainstream. I’ve been a huge nerd my entire life, so why not write about it? Growing up who didn’t dream of getting their letter to Hogwarts, or discovering that their favorite fictional world was real? I think most huge fans have, and that’s who this book is dedicated to. To every fan that has dreamed of living the lives their favorite characters lead.