Young Writers Society

Arium is like other high fantasy, D&D-esque worlds. It has magic, a healthy dose of chaos, and plenty of adventures. But it also has something else: it's the place that people occasionally end up after they die on Earth. For them, Arium is a second chance. And no matter if you came from Earth or were born on Arium, you'll always have a special magical power.

But something's wrong on Arium. It doesn't get a lot of dead people at any given time, but there's even less than usual. For the last seventeen years no one has ended up on Arium after they died. To make matters worse, no one can get in contact with Arium's god or the most recent chosen one.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Van Sullivan has unsurprisingly found himself in another foster home. He's been in and out of them for his entire life, but this foster home is different than the others - it's in the same town he spent a good chunk of his childhood in. It has his favorite graveyard, his favorite set of ghosts no one else can see and his childhood best friend Rosalind "Rosie" Grey.

But Rosie is different now. She's no longer able to brush off the ghosts Van sees as his imaginary friends, no longer likes hanging out at the graveyard her dad is the caretaker for, and is dating one of the most popular boys in the entire school district. She doesn't even like going by Rosie anymore.

If the year couldn't get any worse, their school bus gets into an accident on the way to school one morning. Instead of becoming one of the ghosts he's always talked to, Van finds himself on Arium - with a strange power unlike anything he's ever mentioned.

Van's supposedly the new chosen one because of his sudden arrival and chillness with the dead, but the job comes with very little perks. Armed with his strange power, a questionable narration style, and Rose's boyfriend, Van's going to have to track down a missing god and find out what happened to the last chosen one.

Edit: Feel free to comment in this thread and ask me questions about the story! I'd love to talk about my plans for it.

To kick this thread off, here's one of the songs I've been listening to get some inspiration for this story.

Jumping back onto the picrew train I accidentally started, here's the cast of the novel so far! The names and appearances might change, but Van's appearance is unlikely to at all.



That's Alice and her currently unnamed boyfriend! I made them using this picrew.



And here's Van, who I couldn't use the couple picrew for because he's single like his creator. I used this picrew instead. I was originally leaning towards giving him a leather jacket, but that might be a later update to his outfit - I really like how the hoodie looks on him!

Oooh this sounds intriguing!! Excited to see how the story and characters develop


PS - the title ghosted has ya contemporary romance written all over it
you know, like when you're talking to someone and they stop talking to you out of nowhere and ghost you? (i shouldn't tempt myself with things like this... i have enough ideas right now :p)

Thank you, @Carlito!!

I admit the initial meaning for the title was that they died so they technically became ghosts. It sounded way funnier than it should have in my head, but I thought it worked as a good placeholder!

Now that I fleshed out the plot more, there's definitely some symbolism involved.

I'm trying to distract myself by doing a little bit of plotting right now, so I have some quick updates on the names:

- Van is still Van, but I might change my mind later. >>

- Alice is tentatively renamed Rosalind "Rose" Grey.

- Alice's previously unnamed boyfriend is hesitantly named Theodore "Theo" Mendel.

Arium sounds like an interesting world! A god going missing is a great plot-starter, haha. Definitely something I'd love to see in the summary of a story.

Thank you, @Liminality! I'm glad you like what I have so far for the novel. I'm still fleshing out the details, but I'm definitely having fun with that specific plot-line.

I'm not officially doing the NaNo prep questions, but I'm trying to do a little bit of planning before November starts up. Here's a quick rundown on the non-spoilers I've figured out so far!





The protagonist of this story. Van is the textbook case of an unreliable narrator - and his first person narration style doesn't really help. He's sarcastic, salty and pretends that he doesn't care a lot about other people when anyone who knows him well can easily tell he does. Which sadly isn't a lot of people; he's a foster kid and he just hasn't found the right family yet. He doesn't even remember his birth family.

He's been able to see ghosts for as long as he can remember, but he's been pretty good about playing dumb regarding his ability in recent years. Seeing ghosts isn't exactly normal in his version of Earth, and the last thing he wants is for people to question how he's doing mentally.

Besides being skilled with the dead, he's a major bio nerd. His supposed dream job is working in some place like a morgue or a graveyard, but don't let that fool you: he religiously rewatches Bones and totally imagines being part of a team like that someday.



Van's childhood best friend. They lived in the same town for a few years before some random, currently undecided event happened that made Van switch foster homes again, but she never moved out. The inspiration for her name in the story is also undecided, but she was totally named after Rosalind Franklin outside of the story. Growing up, she went by Rosie for short. Now a high school student, she goes by Rose instead.

She was raised by a single dad who takes care of their town's single graveyard. Because money was always tight and it was hard to hire a babysitter, Rose's earliest memories are playing around in that graveyard - usually with Van in tow.

By the time that Van returns to the town, Rose is dating the richest and most popular boy in the entire school: Theo Mendel. No one ever really expected the couple, but it just made sense after the two of them started to hang out. Rose comes across as shy but has a lot of spunk, and Theo brings that side of her out a lot. Contrary to what Van thinks, they're absolutely adorable and also the main ship of the story.

And, as a random fun fact about Rose: she plays the tuba in her school's concert band, and stubbornly lugs it home every day after practice when she could totally get away with just keeping it in the band room.



Rose's boyfriend. He also happens to be the richest and most popular boy in the entire school, though no one is exactly sure why he's so popular. He just is. Theo can come across as distant and frustratingly polite to those that don't know him well, but to those who do (Rose in particular) realize quickly that he has a much more impulsive, adventurous side. Unfortunately, he's book smart and not really street smart - though he does a knack for winning people over.

His family is rich from an impressive genetic empire. They mainly fund their research through a genealogy company akin to 23andMe, but they've also been known to help with lab work for different forensics groups. They have absolutely no relation to Gregor Mendel (who's considered the father of modern genetics) but they unsurprisingly love to bring up the shared last name. Theo's actually not supposed to take over the company someday, but he still pays attention to its inner workings. It's hard not to when his parents and other relatives all seem to work there.

Even though Rose is Van's childhood best friend, it's Theo who ironically ends up in Arium with Van at the very beginning of the story. In Van's eyes, Theo is the epitome of everything he hates: he's rich, lucky, and seems to be on pretty good terms with Rose. Though Van would be reluctant to admit it to even himself, Theo is perfect for Rose.

His fun fact is that he's very skilled at riding horses, and may or may not end up teaching Van how to ride them at some point.

Because Arium is a place that people can theoretically go when they die, I think the culture is a combination of basically any culture from around the world. I'm still debating if there's any kind of delay between deaths & ending up on Arium. If there can be a delay, there may be a larger prevalence of older cultures present - things like the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs. If not, there's still going to be an underlying current of them, but it's not going to be as blatantly obvious.

Arium is also lacking a language barrier. Everyone still speaks the language that they spoke when they arrive, but the god of the world thought ahead and slipped in a nice magical translator. The moment you end up there, you're able to hear other languages in your own. You can also read other languages, but there might be a little lag with that.

The one thing that doesn't seem to be relevant to any specific Earth culture is the prevalence of hearts and spirals. The food, clothes and buildings have a tendency to reflect both. The hearts in particular look like a heart emoji, but seem weirdly rough.

As a little side note: there are some people who never lived on Earth. These people are descendants of those who did live on Earth, but have little clue what Earth is like outside of stories. The last chosen one - tentatively named Romi - is one of these people.



To put it simply: there isn't a whole lot. Anything that you have with you before you die usually ends up on Arium (Van & Theo are exceptions) but the technology doesn't work as well here. It's not that it can't work; there just isn't an emphasis on technology in this world, so no one's really bothered to work on things like the Internet or phones. Magic usually takes care of anything technology can do.



Speaking of magic, the magic on Arium is pretty simple. Every single person is given a special power. If you were born on Arium, your power likely has something to do with the powers your parents have. If you're from Earth, your power usually has something to do with an internal desire of yours. The only exceptions to both is when Arium's god gets bored and decides to change things up. Even then, the power is still tied to a person's identity.

The magic can be literally anything. Elemental magic is a popular one, but it's not the only kind of magic out there. There's even magic that lets you control other people's magic - or other parts of other people. Those people are obviously some of the more overpowered people in the story, but they usually have some kind of limit to their abilities so they're not too strong.

This is a major spoiler, so don't click on the spoiler down below if you don't want to have a potentially fun surprise ruined:

I still really want to do 50k this November for NaNo, but last night I started working on a chapter from Rose's view after Van and Theo end up on Arium. I think it might have helped me process my own grief a little bit, so I might right more of Rose's perspective leading up to NaNo and focus on Van & Theo's side of the story during the actual NaNo.

I only ended up writing a little bit of a first chapter from Rose's perspective, so I guess I can use it as a reference for both the characters and for the writing style I want to use for anyone other than Van? I'm not sure if it'll actually make its way into the book, but it was the perfect opportunity to explore the story.

Here's two of my favorite snippets from it:

Rose looked in the mirror.

She looked at the girl in her reflection and felt an emptiness that had been lingering about her for the past week. Theo's funeral had been filled with tears; her eyes were red for hours on end. But now that she was preparing for a funeral for her childhood friend, and Rose realized she didn't really know what she was supposed to feel right now. Theo had been her boyfriend for over a year, but she had known Van Sullivan much longer than that.

She sighed, redid her ponytail and tried not to think about how dark the bags underneath her eyes had become.

What were the chances that a freak bus accident would kill the two people that she cared about most besides her father?

And why had she been so dismissive of Van when she saw him for the first time in years?

And yet, despite her aversion to her dad’s workplace, she found herself standing outside of the graveyard gates that afternoon. Thinking about the graveyard was always a mistake; it always brought her back to the spot she had said goodbye years ago. She would always rest her arms against the cold iron of the gate. She would give the graveyard a quick little survey, daring her brain to conjure up the image of a little boy darting between the headstones. And then she would take a deep breath, sigh, and turn her back to the graveyard like she had a hundred times before.
But this time, she saw someone.

There was a boy standing among the graves. He wasn’t the little boy from her imagination. He didn’t have the same messy dark hair, or the same too-large, musty blue sweater that was from his foster dad’s slightly older nephew. He was a boy who was right around her current age, wearing more black than she had ever thought was physically possible. Black shirt, black leather jacket, black jeans, and black boots. He even had a pair of black fingerless gloves. He was leaning up against the gravestone like he owned it, even though Rose knew for a fact that the grave belonged to a Revolutionary War soldier who had no living descendants.

...At least, that was what Van had claimed years ago.

I remember seeing someone on Tumblr point out how much Percy Jackson in the Heroes of Olympus series is described as being god-like. I'm really fascinated with doing something similar with Van when other people interact with him - I want him to come across as intangible and as mysterious as the ghosts he can see. I won't get to do it too much because the book is mainly his perspective, but I think random side characters and Theo both serve as good ways to describe how eerie he can be.

Another song for inspiration! I have no idea if this is more for the missing god or for the cult, but I can definitely see the god jamming out to this song from Julie & the Phantoms.

...I think I might have stumbled onto a new character last night.

I still need to figure out what exactly she looks like and when she'll show up in the story, but I know that she'll have absolutely no memories when she shows up - including ones involving her name. I also know that Van is going to give her a name: Temp. If anyone asks me when this book is someday published, I'll say it's short for Temporary.

But since it's not published yet, I can admit it's short for Temperance. The name was 100% a reference to Bones.

Van had to get his love for the show from somewhere.

Hi Mage! I love the subversion of Van's impressions of Theo and Rose. I think it's a nice twist on the typical love triangle plot. I also think the hearts and spirals motif in Arium sounds really interesting. Is it symbolic of something or is it to create a sort of unearthly atmosphere?