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Genre: Young Adult & Youth
About ElithiaLocation: West Coast USA Home Region: Age:18 Website: http://annuvar.blogspot.com Favorite writers: Sarah Woodbury; Robin McKinley; John Green; J.R.R. Tolkien; Markus Zusak; Diana Wynne Jones; Patricia C. Wrede Favorite music: Cat Stevens; Barenaked Ladies; Red Hot Chili Peppers; PotC Soundtrack; Yoriyos; Artisan; Jack Johnson; Kasey Chambers; Once soundtrack Non-noveling interests: tennis; karate; reading; baking; crochet; history |
Joined: Oktober 14, 2008 This Year: Official Participant NaNoWriMo History: NaNoWriMo posts: 72 NaNoWriMo buddies: 13
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Brief Author Bio: ABOUT ME: WRITING: I've known I wanted to be a writer since I was about six and have written roughly five and a half novels in the last few years. Pelata's Quest was my first, at the age of thirteen. serious crap. 88,000 words. After that I moved on to the world of Annuvar, for which I invented three languages (each with a lexicon of roughly 1500 words, though I've currently only worked out four tenses in each) and wrote three novels: To Mend a World might still be my best. The bulk of it was written between January and August of 2008, although it got a plot makeover in June 2009. I still have hopes for its eventual publication. YA, 97k. Home and Haven I wrote in the spring of '09 and it is tied for first place with TMAW as my favorite. 77k, definitely YA, set not in Annuvar but in the slightly distant (okay, not very distant at all) future of our world. Sort of. Sinisters ended up a little over 50k in August 2009. It's stalled, however, and I don't know if I'll ever go back to it. Children's lit, IN THEORY the first book in a series of six, all of which have rough plots...but I'm not as enamoured of them as I once was. I still <3 my characters, though. My WriMo09 novel will be something quite different. I'll be steampunkin' it with children's lit. |
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Synopsis: The Heliand Train
Heliand is a small city in the Commonwealth of Carolingia in the Inannan Empire, beloved by commuters and tourists wishing to escape the big city. It is connected to the nation’s sprawling capital, Gospel, by the fastest train on the Continent. Powered by steam and by magic, no one knows for sure how quickly this train travels or who controls it, but it is part of the network of super-fast trains that keeps the Inannan Empire the most dominant in the region, firmly above the Sapphemus Consortium, its southern neighbor.
Thirteen-year-old Jacklen Endervvar is a citizen of Carolingia and a resident of Heliand, but he spends most of his time on the train. He sells periodicals in three languages to commuters and foreigners alike, but his dream is to one day be the kind of engineer who operates the railway.
Jacklen’s world is literally turned on its head when in an accident he falls under the wheels of a train. He’s seen other newsboys lose limbs and even their lives under the pounding wheels of the track, but by some miracle he escapes such a fate—but finds something quite unexpected that jars him from his comfortable dreams and sets him on a path quite different from the one he planned.
Excerpt: The Heliand Train
Jacklen was mostly interested in the empty stations they passed in each direction. There were two on the way into Heliand and one on the way out of Gospel; they were always empty, the windows of the ticket booth shuttered and the platform blowing with leaves.
Unlike the strange characters he saw between Heliand and Gospel, Jacklen was confident that he was not the only one who noticed this, because Riss had mentioned it to him once.
“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why someone would go to all the trouble of making a station platform and then not use it.”
Jacklen agreed and filed it away in his list of mysterious things to learn about someday.
But amid all the strange events and the little things surrounding the train that no one understood, there was one big mystery that sat smack in the middle of them all. It was something no one really talked about but everyone—everyone knew—
How the trains of the Inannan Empire worked.
That they worked at all was a great part of the mystery. The empire to the south of them, the Sapphemus Consortium, had trains too, but they traveled at less than half the speed and according to the talk Jacklen had heard on the street, they were powered by coal. Steam billowed out of the smokestack of the trains Jacklen rode on, but he was quite sure that there was no fire burning in the engine, at least not one powered by such wasteful methods.
The thing was, no one knew what the Inannan trains ran on.
Some people said magic. After three months riding the rails every day, Jacklen was inclined to disagree—at least, if there was magic involved, it was something really subtle. An engine powered by sheer magic was anything but. Anyway, Jacklen was fairly sure that as a resource, magic was even more limited than coal.
It was this mystery, the greatest one of all, that kept Jacklen interested in riding the train as a paper boy each day.
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