Forebodingburger LP1 -- Prototype

It is June 2010, in the town of Paradox, Washington.

May Emerson has just graduated high school, failed to impress her family, been cheated on, and lost her best friend. In that order. A strange man, seemingly misplaced in time, offers her an escape: her own corpse, perfectly rendered.

Penelope Materas, living in her parents' research laboratory and literally detached from anyone she could call a peer, has one lifeline left--a pen pal--before she is stuck there forever. She invites him to see the unveiling of her dad's latest and most revolutionary technology.

When Weiss Wakefield receives the invitation to meet his friend from the Labs across the Sound, he is reeling from the death of the girl he betrayed. When he decides to go, just to take his mind off things, he is unaware that he is being watched.

The thing watching him--watching all of them--wants suffering.

When I was a kid, my friend and I had an ongoing RP. It was goofy, melodramatic stuff, the kind of thing you'd expect a couple of tween boys to come up with. But the characters rattled around in my brain for years, and when I was in high school, I started adapting the thing to written fiction and posted it to deviantart (woof). I abandoned that project, and then life happened, and that wasn't part of my life anymore. But the characters kept rattling around in my head, and I was always bummed that I couldn't experience a full story with them.

Recently, I went back and looked at that deviantart account about a year ago, fully expecting to cringe myself into a little ball, but to my genuine surprise I didn't hate it. So, I decided, what the hell, I can't do any worse. I sat down and started writing again, wanting to come up with something, to write a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. 80,000 120,000 words later, I am, perhaps, halfway done. 🙃

This is a novel in progress. It is a fantasy romance--you might call it YA, I guess--set against the backdrop of 2010.  It is messy and melodramatic and not tremendously focused, but I hope you enjoy it.

This itch project is a proof of concept, or a prototype, or a work in progress. You may read the published chapters at the links below, or, if you pay me at least a dollar, you can listen to me read it aloud, including chapters in the future. If you use a screen reader and would prefer to hear a human, please DM me on bluesky or Tumblr and I will hook you up.

Currently available chapters:

1. alpha runout groove
2. alpha middle of the chorus
   
3. alpha all acute lines
   
4. alpha up entangled/cold morning
   
5. alpha temporary battles
   
6. alpha brighter things
   
7. alpha things we knew
   
8. alpha ask me a question
   
9. alpha money to burn, time to kill

bonus!

b1.beta matricide

or, read all of part 1 here!
read all of part 1.5 here!