A YA Dystopian Novel of My Very Own!

Today is the last day of November, which means the last day of another year of NaNoWriMo.  Just in case anyone (meaning the one or two people who actually read this blog) needs a refresher, NaNoWriMo happens every year from Nov. 1-30, during which time aspiring novelists attempt to write an entire novel (well, more like a novella) of 50,000 words during a single month.

This was my sixth year participating in Nanowrimo, and I'm glad to announce that it was also my sixth year successfully completing a 50,000 word novel!  I was pretty sure that this year was going to be the year I finally threw in the towel.  I had been working far ahead of time on outlining a plot and creating character sketches this year, so I was ready to go.  But maybe I was just a little bit too prepared - when I started writing on day 1, I was already bored with the plot and the characters I'd chosen.  Not a good start.  I decided that taking care of an 18 month old full time while being pregnant with a second baby might not be the best time to be undertaking a new novel.  So I decided on day 1 to skip it this year.

But for some reason, I can never not do Nanowrimo.  So I took a day off on day 2, but on day 3 I was back, and I decided to start all over, completely from scratch.  I reset my word counter to 0, which was a bit intimidating, but then I managed to surprise myself by churning out 5,000 words that day, and I stayed ahead the whole rest of the way.  I've been reading a ton of YA dystopian fiction lately, and I'd been jokingly saying that I needed to write a YA dystopian novel of my own.  Well, no better time than the present, right?

So this year's novel ended up being very different from anything else I've written.  I was able to combine my love of YA, my love of sci-fi, and my new-found love for dystopia into what turned out to be a really fun exercise in writing for me.  Cy has been reading it as I've been writing and is almost done, so we'll see if my one reader thinks it's any good once he finishes.

And now for a spoiler.  Or a synopsis, rather.  I realize as I'm trying to condense my novel into a brief summary that it's the kind of plot that will appeal to only a very small niche of people.  But it appealed to me, and I had more fun writing than I've had writing any of my Nano novels yet, I think.  Anyway, without further ado, the novel is called Alter Nation, and it's set in a dystopian United States that is no longer the United States but instead, the Disjointed Territories of America (each territory ruled by a Moderator), the Union having been dissolved after a Second Civil War.  The main character is a rising high school senior named Asher Aiken, and when the story opens, he's just stolen his dad's car and crashed it, paralyzing himself in the process.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) for him, his dad has booked him a trip to Alter Nation.  Alter Nation is a privately funded research facility that spans the west coast of the Disjointed Territories.  It is surrounded by a huge stone wall, behind which scientists have managed to harness alternate realities.  They have the ability to pluck people from another reality and Switch them with someone in Asher's reality, swapping their consciousnesses so that someone like Asher can wake up as good as new in a healthy, whole version of his own body, and forget that his accident ever even happened.  But the Switch doesn't turn out to be the perfect fix it's touted to be, and Asher of course meets a girl while he's waiting to be Switched, and then of course, he becomes aware of some sketchy practices happening behind closed doors at Alter Nation and ultimately has some tough moral decisions to make.  Coming-of-age, identity, all the usual suspects as far as YA themes seem to pop up.  That's basically the gist...if you're interested, you'll have to wait until I (hopefully) edit the novel and (hopefully) publish it to find out the rest!  (I say hopefully because, if you will notice, I said that I have finished Nanowrimo 6 times.  Out of the past 5 years, I have finished editing and self-published exactly 2 of those books!)

But like I said, I had a ton of fun writing it this year (despite my yearly bout of anger at the discrepancies between my word counter and the one on the Nanowrimo site) and I'm really glad I decided to go ahead and dive in.  I'm also extremely relieved November is now over.  I'm ready to take a break and read something that someone else has written instead of writing something myself!