I have a non-fiction work called Right of the Soil: An Abstractor's View of Indian Land Title in New York State. (More on that in another post.) I'm editing that one too, but I really don't count that as exceeding my self-imposed project limit because, being an historian, I do history day in and day out.
The fiction work I have in edits I did the first year I tried NaNoWriMo. It's called The Milk Carton Murders. I post a snippet every Sunday as part of Snippet Sunday and Weekend Writing Warriors. Past snippets can be found here.
The other one that I am still writing I started before I got the NaNo bug. I haven't said much about it. I actually started it before the movie National Treasure came out. (Although I choked at first, it's not really the same, and I love the movie.) The people I had read the first few chapters liked it but I put it aside for a while because even though it is fiction, it has true historic elements, so it required more concentration then I had available at the time. My kids were in school and scouts and there was just too much going on. When there was one of those agent pitch things I submitted it. I was told an adventure was more for middle grade and characters 17-21 was a hard sell. Well lookie now there seems to be a new category slowly creeping in called "New Adult" (NA). So I think I will get back at this one. I even have an outline---an odd thing for a pantster. And who doesn't like an adventure anyway? So here is a blurb of what it is about.
The Treasure of Capachequi
The parents of seventeen-year-old ANNIE VANWYKE have a secret. One that’s been kept from one generation to the next, not to be revealed until each child turns twenty-one. With "Wykeology" lessons every weekend, part of their parent’s strange obsession with learning their family’s history, it didn't leave much time for socializing.
Annie’s older brother Seth thinks the family’s secrets are part of some conspiracy, but he thinks that about a lot of things. He hates the large mansion they call home. Their life in Great Bend, Pennsylvania is all too cloak and dagger for his taste. Annie takes their quirky, recluse life in stride as a sign of over protective parents. She loves their home. It reflected her love of history, but admittedly, the servants seem to know more than Annie and Seth about their family's past.
When Annie is told she and Seth must go away for the summer to visit an uncle in his lighthouse on Lake Ontario, she is stunned. They were never allowed out without a bodyguard, let alone go out of state without their parents. Annie eavesdrops on a conversation between her father and uncle and hears her uncle request that her father send ahead one of the family diaries and old maps by separate couriers. Seth may be right. Something was going on and they were being sent away for their own safety.
When their limousine is followed to the airport, the chauffeur makes a detour that ends in a crash. Annie’s frantic calls home go unanswered, leaving her and Seth to find their own way to their uncle's lighthouse on the lake. When they meet Lewis Shortsleeve, a Delaware Indian, they realize their paths are one. Seth notices that the amulet around Lewis' neck contains symbols that Seth has seen before among the VanWyke diaries. While looking up the symbols at a local museum they encounter Mariah Jefferson, a descendent of one of Thomas Jefferson’s illegitimate children. Around her wrist is a bracelet with the same symbols along with an odd charm in shape of a coin. Whatever the reasons, their destinies are somehow connected.
They soon surmise that the car crash was no accident. Chased throughout the northeast by a power-hungry organization called Intelligentsia, made up of the world’s most brilliant minds, the mismatched group of four understands that each are in possession of something the Intelligentsia wants. Each carry an heirloom passed down through their families, a key so to speak, that is needed to unravel a puzzle their ancestors couldn’t solve---the location of the treasure of Capachequi. The problem is all four have a different goal when the treasure is found, and one talisman will not work without the others. The Intelligentsia knows it must find all four talismans, even if it means they have to kill to get them.
Annie’s older brother Seth thinks the family’s secrets are part of some conspiracy, but he thinks that about a lot of things. He hates the large mansion they call home. Their life in Great Bend, Pennsylvania is all too cloak and dagger for his taste. Annie takes their quirky, recluse life in stride as a sign of over protective parents. She loves their home. It reflected her love of history, but admittedly, the servants seem to know more than Annie and Seth about their family's past.
When Annie is told she and Seth must go away for the summer to visit an uncle in his lighthouse on Lake Ontario, she is stunned. They were never allowed out without a bodyguard, let alone go out of state without their parents. Annie eavesdrops on a conversation between her father and uncle and hears her uncle request that her father send ahead one of the family diaries and old maps by separate couriers. Seth may be right. Something was going on and they were being sent away for their own safety.
When their limousine is followed to the airport, the chauffeur makes a detour that ends in a crash. Annie’s frantic calls home go unanswered, leaving her and Seth to find their own way to their uncle's lighthouse on the lake. When they meet Lewis Shortsleeve, a Delaware Indian, they realize their paths are one. Seth notices that the amulet around Lewis' neck contains symbols that Seth has seen before among the VanWyke diaries. While looking up the symbols at a local museum they encounter Mariah Jefferson, a descendent of one of Thomas Jefferson’s illegitimate children. Around her wrist is a bracelet with the same symbols along with an odd charm in shape of a coin. Whatever the reasons, their destinies are somehow connected.
They soon surmise that the car crash was no accident. Chased throughout the northeast by a power-hungry organization called Intelligentsia, made up of the world’s most brilliant minds, the mismatched group of four understands that each are in possession of something the Intelligentsia wants. Each carry an heirloom passed down through their families, a key so to speak, that is needed to unravel a puzzle their ancestors couldn’t solve---the location of the treasure of Capachequi. The problem is all four have a different goal when the treasure is found, and one talisman will not work without the others. The Intelligentsia knows it must find all four talismans, even if it means they have to kill to get them.
***
This is post #13 in the Ultimate Blog Challenge
nice! I'd love to read this as a book... I can see why National Treasure made you gulp... but I'd love to see the Native American/African American rule in the story...You have something here... go with your gut! - Jen
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