I recently found a story I started maybe a year or two ago. After re-reading it… I realize it has a lot of potential. I think, if I have any spare time, I’ll work on it. Or I may make it my NaNo project, since there’s not much started on it.
Anyhow, it’s called Alternate, and the basic premise of the story is that a girl named Elsie Jordan wakes up one morning to find herself in an alternate dimension, where everyone 20 years old and younger has been born the opposite way. Her best friend Bethany is a boy, the guy that follows her around drooling is a girl, and so forth.
The thing I like the best about it is that Elsie has such a unique voice; much different than other characters I’ve worked with. The story is in first-person, a point of view I don’t usually work with, and she tends to ramble.
I have come to the conclusion that I live in a very backwards town. It’s not the fact that we have no mall, no theater, no Wal-Mart, or no McDonald’s. It’s not the fact that, though the town’s population is fairly large, they update it by hand every Friday afternoon, on every sign leading into town. It’s not even the fact that, instead of a normal school district, we have all twelve grades using an old college campus downtown that sprawls for blocks.
No, the backwardness of Everglade was given away by a smaller detail that not even the name (Everglade is in Pennsylvania, not Florida, believe it or not) could convey: the ice cream trucks.
Winter in Pennsylvania is no laughing matter – at least in Everglade. It generally involves a few feet of snow, some ice, more snow, a weekend of melting, and then a grand finale of three-foot-deep frozen slush.
But through wind and rain, snow and sleet, blizzards and stock market crashes, the ice cream trucks are there. Everglade has a legion of yellow and white ice cream trucks, very much on schedule and very much all year round.
The truck that comes through my neighborhood does so between six and six-thirty a.m., without fail. At a quarter after six, the truck passes in front of my house, thus waking me up in time for school.
Who needs alarm clocks? Nobody in Everglade.
And my truck, just like every other truck in the ice cream regime, has a very distinctive (read: obnoxious) tune. It starts off sounding quite a bit like the “little Indians” song from preschool. But right before it gets to the tenth little Indian, it hiccups and blurts, “Pop! goes the weasel.”
After seventeen years, though, you get used to Indians popping weasels in the head. It becomes an ignored fact of life.
At six-fifteen on Monday morning, the fifth of October, the tenth Indian and his weasel woke me up, just in time to get ready for school… just like every morning.
This is, by the way, the very beginning of the story. It comes in five parts, Monday through Friday. I can’t wait to get really moving on this. You know, in all my spare time.