NaNoWriMo 2010: Red Words

[amandaink]

Since the wipe of the entire NaNoWriMo website is coming in roughly ten days, I thought I'd post my 2010 novel info here. You know, for posterity and such.

Red Words
Horror/Supernatural

At eleven years old Ashton Casey learned that he’s not like most other people. Most people don’t see letters in color. They don’t identify voices by their hues and they don’t associate the shrill sound of their mother’s car alarm with even shriller yellow. At seventeen he has a name for it--synesthesia.

His previous life--a small home on the lower class edge of the suburbs, a little sister getting ready for her first year of high school, and a single mother struggling from paycheck to paycheck--is uprooted in only a few months’ time. His senior year finds him cushioned in the unfamiliar luxury of The Queen’s Theatre, the apartment suites located on the upscale side of town, paid for in full by his mother who just earned her fortune launching a chain of highly successful coffee shops. Charlotte, his little sister, died in a bus accident at the beginning of summer and Ash is thrust into grief counseling. Through all this, Ash clutches tightly to his best friend Ethan and the colors that stay mercifully familiar even in this new life.

But his precarious new reality takes a shift with a single envelope found in his pile of mail one morning--an envelope meant for the room above his. He delivers the letter to the enigmatic inhabitant of room C-14, a gentleman of unknown origin and fortune. Days after their encounter, Ash can’t get him off his mind. He’s stuck on this man who speaks in gorgeous red, who’s seen more of the world than Ash knew existed, whose refined taste masks dark ideals, and who will ultimately unravel Ash’s life strand by fragile strand.

Last year was my second year doing NaNo and my first time winning. I reread this beast earlier this year and it was a lot better than I remembered. It still sucked all over the place but after a few rounds of editing, it's actually not half terribad. It's still never going into the world though. It's staying right in my binder for my own amusement.