Story Outline - Blog Posts

The Puzzler Bunch- Cute Story Idea

I already posted the art for the characters here if you wanna see it. This one is an older draft that I've been meaning to post.

Enjoy!

I was sketching in my sketchbook, coming up with as many different character designs for children as I could. I'm working on refining this new drawing style I'm working in, you see.

I drew a trio of characters, a boy and 2 girls.

The boy was tall and skinny. I gave him curly hair, a rectangular-shaped head and slightly angular features (I used shape language a lot for my character art) One of the girls was also on the tall side. She had an oval-shaped head, long straight hair and round eyes. She looked very kind. The last girl was shorter than her friends. I already had in mind that she would be a bold and smart character (both in intelligence and cheekiness) She has a triangular-shaped head, narrowed eyes and a little smirk as if she knows something you don't know. I gave her neat braids (the simple, stylized kind) that end as a little afro puff atop her head.

I really liked this trio of characters and came up with a little backstory for them. I named them Harold (who goes by Harry), Marissa and Alice.

They're a group of friends that live in the same neighbourhood and attend the same primary school. Another thing they share in common is that they have a love for puzzle-solving.

Each of them has a type of puzzle they are best at. Harold likes word puzzles, Marissa likes mechanical puzzles and Alice likes logic puzzles, especially math puzzles.

Fellow students at school call them the Puzzler Bunch. They're known around the schoolyard for their 'unnatural' (for ten-year-olds) cleverness when it comes to figuring out complex puzzles.

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If I were to write a story with these characters, it would revolve around them finding increasingly complex puzzles left around the schoolyard and places they frequent in their neighbourhood after the overly dramatic Anaiah (a year-mate of theirs) demands that they help her find who stole her jewel-encrusted compact.

They left a cryptogram puzzle in its place, so obviously Anaiah runs to her sweet 'Harry-bear' so he can solve it and find her stolen compact! Oh and his sidekicks can help too, she supposes (she doesn't know nor does she care about who can solve what type of puzzle)

They decide to take up the challenge and they're led around the schoolyard and their neighbourhood as each puzzle leads them to the next, getting increasingly more difficult as they get closer to solving the mystery of the missing compact.

The questions are who's leaving these puzzles, why are they leaving these puzzles and did they really have to involve 'Madly in love with Harry' Anaiah?

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I'll have an answer to all those questions once I do some more planning. I've also realised that I've made a lot of work for myself. I barely know anything about solving puzzles and now I've gotta create 10 puzzles for this story!

Wip Intro: Yellow Houses

I should start by saying that this project is shelved. I’m currently too busy to devote it the time it deserves while juggling uni and another novel. Hopefully, I’ll pick it up one day in the future, but for now, let’s just let it age like a fine wine on a USB stick, shall we?

Genre: Lit-fic/mystery? Logline:  Ellen, an aspiring university journalist, finds an envelope in her mailbox filled with photographs of upper-class houses. When she visits these addresses she finds they’ve all been vandalized -- painted a neon, school-bus yellow. When the two vandals engage with her via a virtual chatroom to propose that she cover their ‘art project’ for the local newspaper, she must do her best to write a non-biased recollection of the conflicts that ensue. Literal Logline: A bunch of young hipsters create pretentious art and go on tangents about eating the rich. Also, there is a creepy/psychopathic mayor candidate always wearing a signature yellow jacket and tie having an affair with Ellen’s mom! Fun!

Setting: Takes place in a small, fictional town in British Columbia. But a lot of scenes also take place in a chatroom, with virtual urban cities like Tokyo, New York and more. 

Excerpt from the chatroom scene! TW/NSFW warning: mild sexuality. Also I haven’t line edited much yet, oops!

My baby pink VR headset landed me 2050, Chinatown; a street puddled with neon lights swimming in oily water, reflecting a Tetris stack of knockoff Balenciaga retailers. A couple Hello Kitty shaped arcade machines silhouetted a bar window, casting a pink and blue grid over my friends, who caught sight of me and waved. In only 330 hours, 20 minutes, 12 seconds, I’d come to know them better than their own families. If I hovered over their bodies, too creamy and poreless to be truly photorealistic, a timer would reveal when we’d clicked accept, invited eachother into our second lives.

Cassie’s heart shaped face grinned, her bejeweled teeth blue in the ink of store lights. She tossed her metal bat up high, and caught it on her index finger, balancing it there. Jada’s newly installed robo arms were translucent plastic. There were wires tangled inside.

           Across the plaza, next to some motorcycles collapsed like dominos, a tall woman with a black veil over her face dragged a leash with a crawling half naked man in a bunny mask on the end of it, shuffling clumsily to keep up with her long strides. When she greeted us with nod, Jada let out a squeak before muting her microphone to safely burst into giggles.

           “So many weirdos tonight,” Cassie said lowly, staring at the slave’s bony butt disappear around the boba shack. “Alors.” Her hands came together in a prayer. “Matching tattoos. Glowing ones, from the new update. And don’t even think about saying no, I have enough coins for all of us. You’ve got no excuse whatsoever.” She linked her arm through mine and Jada slung her robo arm over my shoulder and they steered me across the street. A group of white-haired teenagers, teardrop wings trailing along their bare feet drifted past us at the traffic lights, which only existed to flash ads for fast food chains or reduced phone plans at the pedestrians. One of them poked out her tongue at me. Pastel blue and pierced with a tiny metal seahorse.