dsbenson’s novel-in-progress is a detective fantasy aimed at a middle-school audience.
When young Harris is sent to for the summer to live with his estranged uncle, a retired and quite possibly crazy detective, he finds a twisted web of old family secrets, insanity and a threat from beyond the grave.
Status: I’ve finished the first four chapters, and I’m happy with them. The arch of the plot is well worked out for the beginning (which I’ve written) and the ending, but now I need to do some more work on the middle. I need to make sure that the pieces of the mystery build up in a reasonable way, rather than just letting the characters take over and do what they want.
Working on it! There are some cool elements I’m looking forward to writing: a rotting mansion on a hill, a secret history, mythology from Ireland and Scotland (which I may have to make up, as I can’t quite find the specific mythos I need), and so forth.
Oh, and perhaps some ghosts.
Here is the first page:
Harris stared at nothing at all, and he especially did not stare at the straight blond hair of the talkative girl at the next desk, and he determined to pay no attention to the deep green sweater fuzz that waved like a forest of sea kelp back and forth at the nape of her skinny and freckled neck. Stupid, stupid Olivia was blabbing away again, waggling her prehensile jaw like some skinny pterosaur in tight pants while putting on a fresh coat of shiny, pink lipstick and assuming that everyone within earshot was hanging on every word. “I just adore summer. Don’t you just love it? I do. We’re spending the whole vacation at Vista del Mar, and it’ll be warm and sunny every day. You just have to come and visit, won’t you?”
Harris didn’t respond. But then, Olivia wasn’t speaking to him. He squirmed in his seat to keep from scratching his itching hands, afraid of looking like some hairy-palmed freak with a skin disease. But the other kids weren’t listening either–they were too busy hollering and tossing balled-up paper at the ceiling as the final bell rang. Harris just eased a bit lower in his chair and hunched his shoulders, picking at a scraggly line someone else had long ago carved into the wooden desk. When most of the shouting had passed into the hallway, he grabbed his backpack and followed the crowd jostling its way out to the yellow and black parade of school buses.
The brutal Chicago winter was gone, blown away by a windy spring that pulled the last few weeks of the school year after it like small paper tornadoes. His middle school classmates thought of little else but the long summer vacation to come. For them, summer was a time for games in the streets, for bicycles and adventure, for sipping unnatural blue drinks with little paper and toothpick umbrellas in them on sandy Mexican beaches. But for Harrison Cheviot Tweed, summer was the worst time of the year.