Recommendation Tuesday: ‘Peter: A Tale From Neverland’

Last post, I said that I wasn’t going to go into how I came to pick The Neverland back up and start working on it again, and in truth, it’s partly because I don’t remember exactly what gave me that final nudge to open up the Notes file on my iPod and start writing. I think it was a combination of different things, one of which was discovering this book.

How I came across it is one of those weird series of coincidences that is actually really common on the internet, but sounds odd whenever you try to explain it to anyone. I was at work, and one of my colleagues tweeted something with the hashtag #PeterPan. Huge fan though I am, I had never thought to check out anything related to Peter Pan on Twitter, so I clicked on the hashtag and came across this very cute account: @Peter_Pan_ 

As you can see, the most recent activity is a retweet from Jonathan Wenzel about his Peter Pan novel. At the time of tweeting it was only available for preorder, but now you can buy it directly from the US Amazon. Curious, I clicked on Wenzel’s website and started reading about his novel, which is a telling of the origin story of Peter Pan.

I’ve read one other fan-created version of Peter Pan’s origin story, which is Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. It’s a fun tale, but it didn’t read as a convincing canon version of how Peter Pan came into being. At least, I wasn’t completely convinced by it, and it appears Jonathan Wenzel felt the same way; in a Q&A video about his novel, Wenzel said,

“I read a Peter Pan origin story in high school, and I liked it – I liked it a lot – but I finished it, closed the book, put it down, and went, ‘That’s not how it happened.’”

Jon Wenzel shares some questions and answers about his book, Peter: A Tale From Neverland

So I knew I was dealing with a likeminded soul here. (I know it’s not explicitly stated that he was referring to Peter and the Starcatchers, but it was a pretty good bet, and I confirmed via a comment on the video which Wenzel replied to that he was indeed talking about that novel). After watching the rest of the video and reading through the book’s reviews on Amazon, I decided to buy myself a copy. (I was originally going to ask for it for Christmas, but screw waiting).

I read it on and off throughout December and finished it last night; it’s not the type of book that compels you to devour it as quickly as humanly possible, but it was a very good read. It took me a couple of chapters to get used to the author’s style, and as with all self-published novels, there are some spelling errors and missing words scattered about. But those are really my biggest criticisms.

With Peter: A Tale From Neverland Wenzel creates a complex and fully-realised Neverland complete with detailed depictions of the creatures who live there and their unique cultures. The novel’s historical (and geographical) setting is ambiguous, but that doesn’t detract from the story being told. And while you know from the start that Peter has to survive the novel, Wenzel finds other ways to raise the stakes and create a sense of risk. There are some clever little details sown through the story which are important to the novel’s endgame, and while I could tell that they were significant, I didn’t manage to guess just how they would be brought back into play.

I do find Peter: A Tale From Neverland to be a more convincing origin story for Peter Pan than Peter and the Starcatchers, and I think a lot of that is because Wenzel understands that not everything needs an explanation. The island that is Neverland and its inhabitants just exist, and there isn’t any need to explain how or why. Peter and the Starcatchers attempted to systematically tick off every aspect of the Peter Pan world and explain how it came into being, but the more you try to rationalise things, the more attention you draw to how unnatural they are, and the less convincing they become.

With that said, though, I don’t accept A Tale From Neverland as Peter Pan’s origin story. Part of the problem is that Peter Pan does have an origin story, and as unlikely as it may sound (in Peter and Wendy, Peter tells Wendy that he “ran away the day he was born” and “lived a long long time among the fairies” in Kensington Gardens), it fits with the way Peter is written and the world that Barrie created. Peter Pan in the original canon is a slightly surreal figure, not quite human, and to give him a human origin – even if fantastical things happen to him along the way – defeats the object of who he is.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the heck out of a story which imagines a human origin for him, and Jon Wenzel’s creation is a very enjoyable one. I gave it a 9/10 in my “book of books” (a notebook in which I record each book I’ve finished, the date, author and what I thought of it, including marks out of ten) and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for something new to read, particularly if you like fantasy, history or are a fan of Peter Pan. (Click the image at the top of this post to go to the book’s page on Amazon).

Also, Wenzel has confirmed that there will be follow-ups to A Tale From Neverland, and I am very excited to read those whenever they are published!

A Return to Neverland

SHE'S BACK!

THAT’S RIGHT.

Normally at this point I would begin a long spiel telling you how I never meant to let The Neverland drop but ~things got in the way~, and then explain in great detail what those things were and how crazy it all was, and then what inspired me to pick the project back up and begin working on it again. But that’s pretty boring for you to read and it’s not that interesting for me to write either.

So to cut a very long story short, a few weeks ago I started working on The Neverland again, starting with some notes which I wrote on my iPod, which snowballed into plot development, character ideas and filling in some holes which have been plaguing me ever since I first attempted this story for NaNoWriMo over three years ago. (God, it’s been a while).

Here’s a brief summary of what I’ve achieved since I picked The Neverland back up and dusted it off:

• I’ve sorted out what happens in the climax of the story, which has been my biggest persistent issue with the plot. It employs some very handwave-y computer science and I’ll probably improve on it as I come to write that part, but I’m happy with the basic idea and it ticks all the boxes of what I wanted to do with the plot climax.
• I’ve written up a detailed plot outline to replace all the scattered and conflicting notes that formed my outline before. (Going back over all my notes with fresh eyes also made me realise what a mess they all were – and how many little details had got lost or been changed over the course of writing the story).
• I’ve also managed to tighten up the pacing, particularly towards the end. (Leave it to me to mess that up the minute I start writing, though).
• I’ve added to my Character Arc notes for Peter and Wendy and also written a character arc for Tinkerbell and part of one for Tiger Lily. I still have a lot of work to do in terms of developing the story’s side characters.
• I’ve drafted part of the “Saving Tinkerbell” scene, one of the climactic scenes of the novel. It’s only a few hundred words so far, but it’s good to get my ideas down for me to come back to and expand on later.
• I’ve broken down the plot into a series of conflicts, which has really helped me to sort out the key elements driving each stage of the narrative and not lose sight of where the story is meant to be going at each point.

Lots of progress! In general I think that coming back to the story after a break has helped improve my focus, and I’ve been able to determine which bits are just cluttering up the narrative and get rid of them to tell a cleaner and more coherent story. That’s one of the things that is hard to do during NaNo; the goal is just GET TO 50,000 BY WHATEVER MEANS, so you throw everything and the kitchen sink at your story to pad it out, but not much of that makes for a good end result.

With that said, there are some things I’ve lost in the two and a half year break from The Neverland. I remember very little of my extensive research into BBS culture and late 80s internet and technology, which is going to take a lot of picking back up and revisiting. Like I said in the bullet points above, a lot of little details I’d planned on including when I started writing the story got lost or didn’t fit as it developed, but it makes me wonder what kind of a story it would have been if I’d stuck to my original plans for some parts. I read back over some of my old blog posts before writing this, including ‘A Blast From the Past’, in which I talked about how re-reading the novel Peter and Wendy had given me a new perspective on the original canon. Towards the end of the post, I wrote:

After re-reading Peter and Wendy, I think I have a better idea of how the middle of the story is going to go. I was always pretty sure about how it would start and end, but the middle has always been sort of up for grabs.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what I was referring to or whether the idea I’d had for the middle of the story has survived in the current version. Hopefully it has!

So, what next for The Neverland? I’m happy with the level of plot planning I’ve reached over the past few weeks. There’s still a lot I can do in terms of character development and research, but I think it’s time to take the plunge and start (re)drafting the story; I can figure out the rest of it as I go along. I have a specific plan for writing the story which I will reveal in another post in a few days’ time. Also, look out the day after tomorrow for my first Recommendation Tuesday of the revived blog!

Peter’s Backstory

This post will make better sense if you've read either this post or this post first. Or both. :3

Author’s Notes: I was looking back through my post history for the blog and realised how long it’s been since I posted actual story content. I admit I haven’t written anything new for some time, but months ago I wrote a prose piece about Peter’s backstory from his mother’s perspective that I’d planned to post on the blog. However, I showed it to a friend whom I’d hoped would help me edit it, and the problems that she pointed out were so intrinsic that I despaired of ever being able to fix them short of totally rewriting the whole thing. So I put it away and didn’t look at it.

But just now I thought, what the hell. I’ve already established that I’m willing to put up first draft excerpts on this blog, so why is it so important that this one piece has to be of uber-high quality? Yeah, the execution isn’t great, but it’s the events that are relayed that matter more to Peter’s character, and which are likely to be of interest to you, readers of this blog x3

Even with my newly lowered standards, though, the beginning wasn’t really worth posting xD So I’ve missed out Peter Pan: The Toddler Years and skipped straight to when Peter is nine years old and already attending secondary school…

On Writing Fluff

Wow, it’s been a while. I know, I’ve really dropped the ball on the regular updates to this blog so far – in fact, on having updates at all – and my own tendency to constantly switch my focus between different projects has thrown a spanner into the works, as I knew it would before too long. But I also have another theory as to why I’ve been reluctant to update this blog: I’ve been setting the bar for myself too high. Lately, at least, I’ve been trying to make each post absolutely meaningful and worthwhile on all levels – either saying something insightful about writing; containing a lot of info about, or a new instalment of, the story; or doing a kind of review-slash-informational-piece about someone else’s work for Recommendation Tuesday. And I figured it was better to update the blog less frequently with more meaningful posts than to scrape the bottom of the barrel for interesting content.

To Serialise Or Not To Serialise?

Or, ‘On Making Rough Drafts Public’.

Originally I was going to have this Friday’s post be about The Evolution of Setting, but I couldn’t remember half the points I wanted to cover, and I decided that I should probably save most of these backward-looking posts for when I’ve actually, y’know, finished a first draft or something similarly outlandish. So instead I’m going to talk about an important consideration for any writer who wants to build up a following online: namely, how polished does my writing have to be before I post it on the Internet?

Recommendation Tuesday: TPB AFK

This is one of those Tuesdays I mentioned where I will recommend something that's not-so-directly linked to The Neverland as a project, but has themes and subject matter in common. Is it still awesome? Oh yes.

If you're an Internet user, you may well have heard of The Pirate Bay, one of the biggest and most notorious sites for pirated downloads. But have you heard of the documentary that tells the story of the users behind The Pirate Bay, their beliefs about freedom of information which led them to create the site, and their recent court battle against the Swedish government?

Chapter One | The Darling House | 11:47 PM

Author's Notes: I tried SO hard to get this post up on time. I really did. I sat for hours yesterday with a blank document open and couldn't think of the right words to start off. I stayed up until 1 in the morning trying to write something that didn't sound godawful. I managed a couple of paragraphs before giving up. Then today, I went to visit a friend who lives in another county. On the train journey there I opened up the Notes on my iPod and immediately knew how the next bit should go. On the way back not only did I finish the post but I started planning out character arcs and suddenly a whole load of ideas came together. I won't spend forever talking about them here, but I am super stoked. Clearly what I need to do is just write every word of my novel whilst riding around on English trains x3
--

That night, Wendy lay awake for an hour after her parents had gone to bed, until she was sure that they must be asleep. She crept out into the corridor and strained her ears for the murmur of her parents’ voices, but all she could hear were the sounds of deep breathing and John’s light snores coming from the bedroom he and Michael shared. Perfect. 

Recommendation Tuesday: 'Digital: A Love Story'

It’s Tuesday! I’m posting something! Yaaaaay!

For our first ‘Recommendation Tuesday’ I wanted to flag up a Visual Novel that’s been a huge influence on this story and especially my choice of setting. If you haven’t heard of a VN before, here’s a quick primer. I always describe it as a cross between a game and a “choose your own adventure” story – except that having said that, this VN is so much more than that. It’s called ‘Digital: A Love Story’ and you can download it for free from Lemma Soft Forums right here.

Chapter One | The Darling House | 11:15 AM

WELCOME TO PIRATES V2.2! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?

YES

THE YEAR IS 1665. YOU ARE A SWASHBUCKLING, SEAFARING LASS ABOARD THE HMS COMMODORE, A LAW-ABIDING MERCHANT VESSEL WHICH SAILS THE TRADE ROUTES OF THE CARIBBEAN. THESE TRADE ROUTES ARE OFTEN BESET BY PIRATE SHIPS: VESSELS FULL OF VILLAINOUS ROGUES WHO WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO GET THEIR HANDS ON YOUR CARGO. I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT ME WITH COMMANDS OF 1 OR 2 WORDS.

(IF STUCK TYPE HELP FOR SOME HINTS)

A FELLOW SHIP IS SIGHTED OFF THE PORT BOW. IT IS FLYING THE UNION JACK, BUT SOMETHING SEEMS SUSPICIOUS. SHOULD YOU WAIT, OR INVESTIGATE THE SHIP?

WAIT

Wendy laughed, looking over her brother’s shoulder. “You’re not meant to do that! It’s right there in the text. You always play things so safe.”

“I wanted to see what you’d coded for the ‘wait’ option,” John reasoned mildly.

I Have a Cunning Plan

HELLO AGAIN. I am so sorry for the radio silence for the past month-and-a-half (gah, it’s been that long? @__@). I was in Japan and then I was in Beijing and then I went to Ha’erbin (a VERY cold Chinese city near the border with Russia) and then I was back in Beijing and then I came home to England. Finally. For four weeks :3 Hooray for uncensored internet! I’ve finally knocked my jetlag on the head and now I’m getting round to all the stuff I totally sidelined for the past couple of weeks while I was travelling about.

While I was on the plane home from Beijing my sleep-deprived brain managed to solve a plot hole for the middle of this story because for some reason I’m more creative when I haven’t slept. That was a positive step. All I need to do now is the actual writing part…

Also, I came up with a plan for a schedule for this blog. I’m going to aim to do two weekly posts, one on Tuesday and one on Friday. (I know today is neither of those. xD I meant to do this post last Friday, started writing it, and completely forgot to finish). Friday’s post will be a regular one – an excerpt, or status update, or ‘The Evolution of Characters’. Tuesday will be Recommendation Day. I will make a blog post recommending something which is linked to this project in some way, like an influential book or person or game. The link might be completely off-the-wall and obscure, but I promise to make the thing I plug an interesting thing.

So there you have it. This is my cunning plan. On Friday I will hopefully remember to make a post and the schedule will come into effect. For the sake of making it official, all times on this blog (for the next 3 weeks at least) are GMT/UTC, so there’s a slim chance that my post won’t go up on Tuesday/Friday in your timezone, but it will be in mine.

What have you (all two of you who read this blog) been up to since I last posted? Leave a comment!

A Little Too Caught Up in Research

This is a question for writers as well as for anyone who’s had to do in-depth research on an obscure topic, perhaps for work or school: Have you ever got so caught up in researching your subject that you forget most people aren’t experts on, say, global warming disaster theories or foreign policy in Tang Dynasty China? It happened to me the day before yesterday. I was with a group of friends, hanging out at someone’s house, and I got up to go to the loo. When I came back, the topic had somehow turned to the Internet in the early 90s and one girl remarked that at that time, not that many people in America used the Internet.

Pretty much all of my research for this fic has pointed towards that definitely not being the case! Certainly amongst such users that were online in the early 90s, America had the biggest demographic by far. In true online forums fashion, I chimed in on a discussion in progress having only heard the most recent comment. “But there were quite a few people on BBSes.”

Excerpt 2 | Durham University Computer Lab | 10:09 PM

Author’s Notes: This is the same excerpt of the story that was on my NaNo profile, but there’s extra context at the beginning and end so that there’s new stuff to read even for those of you who’ve already read it. I chose it for my profile excerpt because I think it’s a good representative of the story content, plot and style. There’s a mixture of narrative and online chat (and I admit, I’m not sure how accurate my descriptions of BBS chat are, but I based them on the information I have available), a bit of late 80s technology, some familiar names from the Peter Pan canon, an interesting revelation or two and hints towards the larger plot. I wanted to give people a flavour of how the characters will be depicted in this universe, and give them a sense of the setting. By and large, I used the same criteria when I picked the first excerpt to post in this blog.

On with the show!

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The building was dark, but not deserted at this time of night. There were a couple of guys sitting at terminals who looked up and nodded as Wendy came in, then went back to what they’d been doing. Wendy sat down and dialled in the number for the CompuChat BBS, which by now she knew off by heart. It felt like forever since she’d last accessed the board at home.

By now, Wendy’s reply to the secretive user ‘Tiger Lily’ had disappeared off the board, and in the week or so since she’d made the post, nothing had come of it. Wendy was relieved and disappointed in equal measure. Her search for ‘The Neverland’ had already hit a dead end and she wasn’t sure where to go from here.

At almost the exact second she thought this, her screen split in two and a chat opened up on the right-hand half of the screen, headed by the words,

TIGER LILY WANTS TO CHAT

A Blast from the Past

Inspired by a conversation with Wrimo YukiAme, on Friday I downloaded the original J.M. Barrie novel Peter and Wendy and read it that afternoon and evening. As a public domain book, it is free to download from Amazon Kindle and if you download Kindle for PC, you can read it on your computer. I also downloaded Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by the same means and finished it on Saturday.

The Evolution of Characters: Peter Pan

When writing an alternate-universe fanfiction, I tend to make sure that the characterisation is as consistent with the original book/series/film as can be, and the same goes for crossovers. If you’re going to change the setting, the time period and the what have you, then all that’s left for the readers to recognise are the characters; without those it wouldn’t even feel like a fanfic, just your own work with some familiar names and faces slapped on. Plus, aren’t the characters what we love the most about any given fandom? I know I do.

With that said, this has to be the AU fanfic where I’ve changed the most about the characters. Some of it is necessary to the setting – this is (almost) the real world, so Peter can’t fly and he does grow up, extremely reluctantly and resentfully. Other stuff, I’ve changed just because it seemed like a cool idea at the time. I’m actually enjoying seeing how much of my own spin I can put on the characters while still keeping them recognisably faithful to Barrie’s original.

Excerpt 1 | Peter's Room | 04:34 AM

Author's Notes: So here we have an excerpt from Peter's point of view. I wrote this as an exercise in character development and titled it "Random Scene From Peter's POV" in my Word document, but I think I know whereabouts in the plot it will come. That's a secret, though ;3 I decided it would work best as the first story excerpt for this blog, because it pretty much stands on its own. There's some context that you can probably infer, but not so much info as to give everything away. Enjoy!

(The setting is in the late '80s, for those of you who got interested in this story back when it had a more modern setting - I decided to push the setting back a bit because late '80s Internet was SUPER COOL).

---

It was always dark when he woke up these days. Peter supposed that in the time zone of some country he might be keeping normal hours, but he had yet to figure out what it was. When he peeled himself from the pillow after two, three, four hours of sleep he always felt groggy, but then he never really rested. The clicks and beeps of his modem wove themselves into his dreams, creating bright patterns. He watched the patterns spin themselves into being around him, admiring the interplay of colours. If the pattern ever broke, he would wake up immediately, stumbling towards the computer to fix whatever bug had presented itself. He couldn’t sleep at all when there was a break in the pattern.

Greetings from the Other Side of NaNo

So, November is over for another year and I can chalk up my third consecutive “loss” after my first and only “win” in 2009 (70,425 words) to the blackboard of my various attempts at NaNoWriMo. At 15,924 words, I’m pretty damn far from the target of 50,000 words in 30 days that NaNo sets for each of us. But I’m also finding it hard to be disappointed with my efforts this month. First off, nearly 16,000 words of anything is not to be scoffed at, as I’m sure any writer will agree. (Well, 16,000 words of Lorem Ipsum is perhaps not the most useful thing, but even that could be used as website filler).  Moreover, I’m still as excited about this story and where it might be going in early December as I was in late October when I first decided to do it for NaNo.

Part of that is because of the epic background research I’ve been doing. (The early years of the Internet and synaesthesia – two subjects that are so damn fascinating I feel like I can’t cram the information into my head fast enough. I also get to pass off reading cyberpunk fiction and various adaptations of Peter Pan as research). Secondly, the characters are coming alive in ways I could never have imagined when I started. (I don’t want to spoil too much, but I owe a lot of fascinating plot development to AuthorXIV’s idea about Tinkerbell. Thanks!!)

Third and most surprisingly, people really like this idea. I’ve had interest in my stories before, but the enthusiasm over the idea of a cyberpunk Peter Pan has just been unexpected. It scares me a little, because what if the story I eventually write isn’t what people had hoped for? The story has changed a lot since the synopsis I initially posted on NaNoWriMo, so what if the people who were interested by that don’t like what it’s turned into? Are my characters too different from J.M. Barrie’s? Am I shooting myself in the foot by trying to stick to the basic plot of Peter Pan – or am I deviating too far? Does my story even class as cyberpunk or is it just a story about people with computers? There is no end to the questions I subject myself to.

On the whole though, I’m psyched to have an audience of interested folks who want to see this story finished as much as I do, and so I’m creating this blog for you all. And for me, because the accountability that it provides will hopefully keep me chugging along with the writing and editing. I will still be serialising the story on my FF.net and AO3 as promised; but until it’s in a fit state to be published online, this blog will be home to progress updates from the battlefield, excerpts of the non-awful bits, background information and whatever else I can get away with classing as “relevant”. (*cough* Peter Pan GIFs *cough*)

I have ambitions for this blog that include reader input on the plot and characters and an old-timey BBS look for the site (providing I can rope Emi into helping me with the CSS… *makes a note*). But for now, all I want to ask is: how was your November? :D