I’ve been working on a novel, titled The Paisley Plane, for over two years now. It started out as a simple wacky idea for a short story about a thief who steals a magic book, and then rapidly starting evolving in my mind into a full-fledged fantasy epic. I fought it for a long time, because it was always my intention for the story to be humorous, satirical, and, in places, blatantly parodic.
I finally gave up fighting it and let the story do its own thing. At first I was trying to adhere to as strict a stereotypical Tolkien-esque fantasy world as I could. After all, that gave me reams of fantasy conventions to make fun of. Then I decided that that was boring, and allowed the setting to adopt some punk elements. I also managed to keep the humor intact. I’m happy with the result.
After my initial burst of inspiration - where I generated thirty-something handwritten pages in one Friday evening - I sat down and generated as much of a storyboard as I could stomach, because I could sense that I’d got a hold of a good idea and that I was going to need to do some intense planning if I ever wanted to see it through. I outlined fourteen chapters before I grew impatient and dove into writing them.
Then I hit the end of the storyboard and, predictably, a brick wall. The story sat stagnant for almost half a year while I spent my time occupied with real life - until last night, when I had a burst of inspiration in, of course, the shower. With renewed enthusiasm, I started on a new chapter, but also revisited and revised what I’d written already. I’d like to present the first chapter of The Paisley Plane. I released a much earlier draft of it as a Facebook note over a year ago, and I think the only person who ever read it was a woman I dated for a few weeks last spring.
So, this is the most recent draft, but is certainly still not final. I’m open to any and all criticism, though if you’d do your best to keep it constructive, I’d be much obliged.
Copy-pasting it was dumb. So here it is in a nice google doc.