Hi peeps :))
help me brainstorm my story?
summary is below.
outline
summary of start: Hale moves to japan to avoid his crazy ex. the ex in question (Myvatna) is a cult leader and really is quie obsessed with him. like, “I want your skin as a blanket because it makes me feel loved” obsessed.
tkdr he gets roped into making a body for Athena, who is half-AI and half-ancient soul. Aurexia is the daughter of the king of hell in this book btw. justine is her kitsune GF and Liv is a random, very human med student who gets cursed by Hale’s crazy ex. Nadie is a ghost who died like 150 ish years ago and has been haunting random libraries ever since.
Midpoint: false success.
Hale builds Athena’s body, programs Athena into it, and then she comes to life! It works! The contract is lifted, then she is released from protecting him. Aurexia works her magic and then she’s done! Yay!
Fail moment: Aurexia’s team falls apart.
they needed everyone they could get to help with the world domination issue. Liv is so tired of the weirdness and chaos and Hale being a pure sadist that she just storms out and leaves. This makes Hale spiral again, even harder than before, and he collapses into depression and suicidal thoughts.
Aurexia realizes she was too hard on him, but also that she can’t really do anything because she doesn’t want to deal with an angel again.
she’s free from the contract with Athena cuz Athena has a second chance at life now so it’s over. She can live where she wants.
Aurexia descends into lonely madness too. She holes up in her room, shoves Justine away again, and just doesn’t come out. She harms herself and it gets out of hand.
Nadie isn’t really gonna get in trouble anymore for the book cuz well. Her work here is done? She doesn’t have to help with anything anymore, no tasks… So she just disappears.
Justine is reeling. What happened to everyone? Did all the work to build a team just… go to waste? What’s wrong with everyone? It’s like no one ever knew each other!
Still, something’s unshakeable in all of their lives. They’re forever changed. They can’t go through their lives anymore with the same attitudes as before and their outlook on life has changed. And Hale keeps having this reoccurring nightmare about the same giant dragon being, large as the earth and black as the abyss in which it lives. (Use Nom Nom snippets for this.)
Liv is pretending none of this happened. She’s trying to live a normal life again, and she’s trying to just go through med school and be a normal 24 year old… but the curse just won’t let her be! she always says stuff she doesn’t mean (even if it is technically true and is exactly what she’s thinking) and she’s drowning in her emotions about everything. Things she’s locked away for years suddenly burst out of nowhere in full force, and she can no longer deny the lengths she goes to pretend she’s okay (and exactly how much she self-sabotages).
Eventually (insert a lot of events and sad scenes here) they come back together because they realize no one can live without the others.
The first one is Hale. He shows up in Aurexia’s corporate office. (Mirror the first job interview). He uses his skills of lying and stuff to get through security and see her.
She initially shoves him away, telling him to leave in a very annoyed tone, but he doesn’t relent. He keeps ringing the goddamn doorbell and Aurexia HAS to answer the door (because she no longer has Athena to help her with these things). She opens it and hale just… says nothing and gives her a hug. She protests at first, saying she’s fine, but hale is too stubborn to give up and let it go again for the second time. He hugs her until she stops protesting and just gives up and leans into him and breaks down for the first time in centuries.
She didn’t just have to be the strong one, she had to be stronger than everyone else. Faster, better at fighting, smarter. It was a matter of life and death. She’s never had the chance to just stop and breathe and look at how far she’s come, because it was never enough. Hale explains that the life she has now is the most amazing reward that she could ever have for all her hard work. She’s doesn’t have to always get more to keep proving that she’s worthy of being alive.
She jokingly offers him to play a game of chess because she has a job for him (except this time it’s saving the world). He agrees and tells her to team up and find the others.
They catch do a spell together (aurexia moves on to actually teaching him stuff that is traditionally useful). They either locate liv and ambush her when she’s at school (because that would be funny lol) or summon her to them… either case she needs to be embarrassed and pissed as fuck. They recruit her.
Then they move onto Athena (she’s easy to find considering Hale’s hacking abilities and her being a literal digital robot). Aurexia helps because she can locate using magic. I think they should actually summon her for ease of access.
Very well. Calling Justine…
[insert confusion of Justine reeling about this for the past like 6 months!!!]
Aurexia feels like shit and just breaks down. Jutine is super pissed and doesn’t want her back this time. However, hale manages to convince her to at least be part of the team, even without Aurexia and her being together. They need her and her underground network of umbrella demons.
Liv is a second opinion. potentioally POV Liv because she’s making the most sense here (everyone else is WAY too emotional).
Nadie gets summoned by Justine’s umbrella demons. She’s not been the same since, and she’s definitely up for the job. It’s lonely being a ghost in a world full of material people.
They’re back together. They’re ready to fight the dragon. hale tells them about his recurring dreams and stuff and they think they know what they’re up against.
And then the convenience shop dude shows up and says all of it was a scam. He’s been travelling around in his convenience shop, planting clues and fake threats for them, and sending Myvatna in circles to protect them all, just because it was in his celestial spider senses that it was something he had to do.
Hale’s visions were in fact flashbacks to trauma he didn’t know existed. Myvatna’s dangerous, but he can help deal with her. He can get them all safe.
After all, he’s the Ronin of Requirement. And he was needed to keep the world from falling into chaos. if these people had never met, and these bonds hadn’t been created, they would have all gone down the wrong path. It was his time to go and he disintegrates into ashes.
Nadie recognizes her father. He loved her but he always cared from afar. She passes on. Before, however, she’d given a token for her bravery by aurexia. The demon tells Nadie to show this to the court, and that it’ll pardon her from whatever shit she’s in atm.
Aurexia must understand. She’s still got her life on earth, but she realizes that what she was running from all along was the fear of never changing. There was a fucking easier way out of this. Also she could have just asked? And because she didn’t understand she just threw the world into chaos for her escape. She kept jumping from things but there’s always somewhere you can call home.
Liv gets it… she’s been looking at this all wrong. The people she fears… they are the ones who always come back for her, the ones that care, and the ones who will treat her right even thought they don’t seem to be the people that will.
She turns to hale and says “thank you for teaching me how kind the world can be” to which hale is like “I’m kind???” But accepts it and is like “ok. I guess I’m not a bad person after all.”
Write an epilogue!
There is definately a book 2 that can happen and it’s super fucking cool I’d love to write it. But after a break.
Also i think I don’t want a romance. I wanted an awakening arc, and I didn’t realize that romance wasn’t the only way to achieve that. In fact, there’s not even romance in this at all :))) (except for the end)
Epilogue:
- liv and hale end up dating (fluff, time to shine!)
- snippet of Nadie in heaven dancing her heart out at a disco, now a bit older (souls age lol)
- aurexia’s doing more in heaven now, but also on earth. She’s gotten everything she’s ever wanted haha. Also made up with the ronin and well. Her father leaves her alone. He knows he can’t control her as much anymore, so he’s less of an issue anymore.
- Justine… well, justine is doing what she loves best. If they get back together tbd. If not she’s happy being a matchmaker on earth and telling fortunes using aurexia’s spell book pages she ripped out (lol she’s the one who stole them lmaooo). She’s got a picture of her love in the corner of her shop, and she tells anyone who asks that her partner died, and that’s her. And, well… it’s partially true, because the aurexia that she loved will never exist again.
my main issue is… it’s getting too much for me to keep track of. thus far i’m at 22k words, which is about 1/3 of the book (I plan 60k words ish). however, i’ve litterally never in my life had such a giant ass writing project. it’s my first actual novel! the last one I wrote was a novelette (around 15k words), and if any of you remember me ranting about Lara, the story was pretty straightforward (except for the major plot twist that I inserted at the end which I won’t mention because that’s not the point).
the point is, however, that I have no clue where to start. my world is underdevelopped, my characters are too, and it’s kinda like i’m writing with a blindfold on. i’m kinda feeling my way around the book. and because i’m a pantser, it was enough at one point, but now it’s the amount of plotholes I have are getting overwhelming.
I really like the dragon plot twist bit. I want to keep it.
btw - Ik I wrote an outline, but the thing is that i’ll probably ignore the intire thing anyway when I start writing it again lol. because… what’s the fun if you follow it?
also I feel like the external stakes in the conflict are really unrealistic. they wouldn’t split up if the world was in danger, would they?
also I intended for the ending to be bittersweet, but the aurexia and justine situation breaks my heart. it’s too sad for me to want to write.
opinions? ideas?
feel free to ask me questions, especially if you think I don’t know the answer. In fact, that would be very helpful and appreciated. it’s something that really helps me come up with ideas.