When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. While Darcy is revising, she’s also growing up. Taken together, the two create a space in which canny readers can deduce even more about the parallels between Darcy’s life and her art.Įditing the novel provides the structure for the rest of the story. Her novel features teenager Lizzie Scofield, who crosses into a ghost world after surviving a terrorist attack and falls in love with a handsome ghost who bears a striking resemblance to many Bollywood actors.Įach enhances the other in ways a single narrative would not: The breathtaking pace of a paranormal page-turner is balanced with the emotional depth of a subtler, character-driven plot. Westerfeld, best-known for the “Uglies” YA science fiction series and steampunk trilogy “Leviathan,” cleverly alternates between the straightforward story of Darcy’s coming of age and the paranormal romance she writes. She moves to New York City instead, where she meets a group of debut novelists, the so-called “sister debs,” and falls in love with older and more experienced novelist Imogen. But it comes with unforeseen problems: The book advance eliminates her school’s financial aid, and she can’t see a way to balance college and a looming book deadline anyway.
Darcy Patel, the protagonist of Scott Westerfeld’s “Afterworlds” (Simon Pulse: 640 pp., $19.99, age 14 and up) writes a novel at 17 during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that lands her a two-book contract.
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