I found my crtique parnter! Angela McCal from YALITCHAT swapped manuscripts with me. So far she's been very helpful to me, even though I don't know if she'd say the same about me. I'm making some changes to my initial chapters, adding more action and dialogue. I'll keep looking for more people to critique my writing because I know how important it is to take others' opinions.
I'm also finishing up my novel. I just wrote the penultimate chapter and it makes me sad to write the ending. Also, I am apprehensive of how my ending might go down with readers! I can assure you its going to come as a shock, but do readers really like shock? Or do they like the comfort of having an ending they'd predicted?
Do you know anything about conspiracy theorists? They are people who always like incidents to conspiracies. Take for example the great number of people who think UFOs control us. Or the people who are obsessed with finding the 'real truth' behind Princess Di's death. Or those who think everything is a part of an international cover-up. It's hard to say if any of them are right, because conspiracy theorists have a tendencies to be unhealthily obsessed with their theories, which causes others to dismiss their notions as mere madness.
My protagonist, Aria Suri, refuses to believe any conspiracy theory behind her brother's disappearance. Her father adopts the notion that his son must have joined a super-secret cult, but Aria decides to not believe him. Of course, what she eventually finds out could put any conspiracy theorist to shame because it's a secret so well-kept, nobody could possibly think it up.
A few days ago, I myself got pretty interested in the theories surrounding unexplained disappearances in history. I found a great site with a list of the world's ten most mysterious disappearances. Here are the top 10:
10. Louis Le Prince
Regarded by many as the true father of movies, Louis Le Prince was a French inventor who developed the first motion picture camera and projection system. In 1888, he used his invention to film Roundhay Garden Scene, a nearly 2-second long clip that is considered the world’s first motion picture. In September of 1890, Le Prince boarded a train bound for Paris, where he was to meet with his family for a trip to the United States to demonstrate his camera. But when the train arrived in Paris, Le Prince, along with his luggage and camera equipment, was nowhere to be found. The inventor was rumored to be nearly broke and deeply depressed, and theories abound that he engineered his own suicide. But it has also been proposed that Le Prince, known for his secrecy and paranoia regarding his work, was in fact murdered by parties seeking to steal the secrets to his invention. The most frequently cited suspect is none other than famed inventor Thomas Edison, now popularly regarded as the inventor of the movie camera, whose company would file a remarkably similar motion picture patent in the years following Le Prince’s disappearance.
9. Flight 19
One of the most bizarre disappearances in aviation history is that of Navy Flight 19, a group of five torpedo bombers that vanished during a training mission near Florida in late 1945. No debris or wreckage from the flight was ever found, and another plane carrying 13 airmen was lost when it exploded while searching for the missing squadron. The Navy conducted an inquiry into the incident, eventually publishing a 500-page report that suggested the pilots may have become disoriented and mistakenly headed out to sea, where they ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. But a general lack of evidence led to the disappearance eventually being listed as “cause unknown,” with one member of the inquiry stating the planes must have “flown off to Mars.” A much stranger theory posited by a number of magazine articles suggested that supernatural elements were responsible for the disappearance, citing bizarre radio transmissions where the pilots report: “We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don’t know where we are, the water is green, no white.” Although no concrete evidence was ever produced to back up these claims, Flight 19 and its disappearance became one of the key incidents that helped to form the legend of the now-famous Bermuda Triangle.
8. Ambrose Bierce
A famed American writer and social critic, Ambrose Bierce is best known for The Devil’s Dictionary, as well as for numerous short stories about ghosts and the American Civil War. He gained fame as a writer for The San Francisco Examiner, where his cynical opinions and relentless sarcasm earned him the nickname “Bitter Bierce.” In 1913, the 71-year-old Bierce, a Civil War veteran, decided to go on a tour of battlefields in the South. He eventually crossed over into Mexico, and spent some time as an observer with Pancho Villa’s army during the Mexican Revolution, before vanishing somewhere near Chihuahua, Mexico in late 1913 or early 1914. Many have speculated that he was murdered, his body hidden by Pancho Villa’s men, who were afraid that Bierce would reveal secrets to the enemy. Still, others have maintained that Bierce’s disappearance was a calculated suicide. For his part, Bierce remained characteristically sardonic to the very end. An oft-quoted passage in one of his final letters reads: “Good-bye — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!”
7. Percy Fawcett
An adventurer and a supposed inspiration for the Indiana Jones character, Percy Fawcett was a British archeologist who gained fame in the early 1900s for a series of map-making expeditions to the jungles of South America. In 1925, Fawcett, along with his son Jack, returned to Brazil as part of an ambitious expedition to discover a supposed lost city located deep in the jungle. On May 25, 1925, Fawcett sent a wire message to his wife letting her know that he, Jack, and a young man named Raleigh Rimmell were venturing into uncharted territory in search of the mythical city, which he had dubbed “Z.” It was the last anyone would hear from the group. The most probable explanation for the disappearance is that local Indian tribes, who were known for their hostility, killed the men, but no proof of foul play was ever uncovered. Other theories claim that Fawcett had survived and was suffering from amnesia, and a legend even spread that he was living as the chief of a tribe of cannibalistic Indians. Despite instructions left by Fawcett prior to the expedition, a number of disastrous search parties have been launched over the years, resulting in the deaths of at least 100 people.
6. D.B. Cooper
One of the most brazen criminals in American history, Dan “D.B.” Cooper was the alias of an unknown man who hijacked a Boeing 727 commercial airliner in 1971. After the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the man demanded and received four parachutes and 200,000 in unmarked bills, at which point he released the passengers and ordered the plane and its four crew members to take off again and head for Reno, Nevada. Shortly after takeoff, Cooper lowered the aft stairs and parachuted from the plane. Though he is suspected to have landed somewhere near Vancouver, Washington, he was never seen again, and no body or remains of a parachute was ever discovered. What followed was one of the largest manhunts in American history, and although there have been over 1000 suspects in the case, Cooper’s true identity and whereabouts remain a mystery.
5. The Mary Celeste
The prototypical “ghost ship,” the Mary Celeste was a merchant vessel that was discovered in 1872 abandoned and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. All of the ship’s 7 crewmembers, along with Captain Benjamin Briggs and his wife and daughter, were nowhere to be found. The ship’s life raft was gone, but the Mary Celeste appeared to be perfectly seaworthy, and even stranger, a number of necessary survival items had been left behind. The ship’s cargo and a number of valuables were also untouched, seemingly ruling out the possibility of piracy. So what could have happened? A number of theories have been proposed, ranging from mutiny to alien abduction, but the most likely scenario is that a freak storm or earthquake caused the ship to take on a small amount of water, leading to a panic and an unnecessary evacuation. Adrift in a single life raft, the survivors are suspected to have perished at sea.
4. Joseph Force Crater
Although he is relatively unknown today, Joseph Force Crater’s disappearance in 1930 became a national obsession, to the point that the phrase “pulling a Crater” became synonymous with vanishing. A well-known judge in New York City, Crater inexplicably disappeared on the night of August 6, 1930. A number of bizarre details surround the case, most notably Crater’s relationship with an Atlantic City showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz, who would herself disappear soon after the Judge. An investigation found that Crater’s safe deposit box had been emptied, along with thousands of dollars from his bank account, but no concrete proof that Crater engineered his own disappearance has ever been uncovered.
3. The Lost Colony
Perhaps the most mysterious case of mass disappearance is the so-called “lost colony” of Roanoke Island. In 1587 a group of 114 people settled the island in an attempt to establish a permanent colony in the New World, but a bitterly harsh growing season and fear of the local Indian tribes led the group to send their leader, John White, back to England for assistance. Upon returning in 1590, he found that the settlement had been dismantled and all 114 colonists, along with Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the colonies, had vanished. The only sign they left behind was the word “Croatan,” the name of a nearby island, carved into a tree. Some claim the colonists were murdered and their settlement razed by Indians, while others blame starvation or raids by Spanish marauders. But the most popular theory continues to be that the colonists were assimilated into a local Indian tribe. Reports from later settlers that some tribes they encountered knew some English have helped to substantiate these claims, and a project is now underway to try to prove the theory using DNA evidence.
2. Amelia Earhart
Perhaps the most famous missing person on this list, Amelia Earhart was a groundbreaking pilot who set numerous records in aviation in the 1920s. In 1937, along with navigator Fred Noonan, she set out for what was to be her crowning achievement: a flight around the world. Near the end of her 29,000-mile journey, Earhart encountered unfavorable weather conditions in the south Pacific, and was unable to find the small island where she was to refuel. Sometime around July 2, all contact with her plane was lost, and Earhart and Noonan would not be seen again. The search that followed was the largest in naval history to that point, covering over 250,000 miles of ocean, but no wreckage from Earhart’s Lockheed Electra was ever found. The most logical explanation is that the plane ran out of gas and ditched in the ocean, but another popular theory states that Earhart and Noonan crashed on an uninhabited island where they eventually died. Still another theory says that the duo crashed on a Japanese-controlled island, where they were captured and eventually executed.
Despite years of speculation and countless investigations, Jimmy Hoffa’s vanishing remains the mother of all missing person stories. A powerful labor organizer, Hoffa was President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters for many years, and was known for his mob connections. He was due to meet two of his mafia contacts on July 30, 1975 at a restaurant in Michigan, but disappeared before the meeting could ever take place. Because of Hoffa’s business dealings and his proven associations with crime families, investigators have little doubt that he was murdered, but the big mystery concerns what became of his body. A number of grisly possibilities were considered, among them that Hoffa’s body was mixed into concrete that was used to build the New York Giants football stadium, that he was buried beneath a swimming pool in Michigan, and that he was crushed in a car compactor, but all of these theories have proven to be unsubstantiated. Hoffa was declared dead in 1982, but his case continues to be open, and every few years a new lead emerges about the possible location of his remains.
Roban is an fictional ancient kingdom I created for 'Unexplained Disappearances'. Roban, like Dimrael, is famous all over the world for it's role in world history. It was once a very prosperous, scientifically advanced kingdom with unbeatable military power. Originally located in Central Asia, it expanded it's control halfway through Asia in a matter of few short years, a feat considered almost unimaginable during it's time. But wherever it went, it left a bloody trail behind it, for Roban was known for being ruthless when it came to consolidating new land.
When the Roban-Dimrael war began, terror and violence threatened to crush Dimrael to the ground. Dimrael was no match for Roban's superior military, but it was much too important to save Dimrael because many considered it the cradle of civilization. How Dimrael finally won the war, how Roban was so disastrously defeated that it never rose from the ashes, and the events that followed are very crucial to my story. I can't tell you much, but let me tell you this- whatever forces helped bring down the mighty Roban exist even to this day, and with time, these forces have only grown stronger.
I studied Science in high-school and I was quite good at it, even if I say so myself. A lot of my classmates thought there was no point in studying history. They believed that science would lead the world into the future, while history was just about boring chapters about the past. But I have always been a through believer of 'HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF'. 'Unexplained Disappearances' is by no means a historical novel. In fact, it fully takes place in the present time. But I still wanted to bring some twist in the plot to show that the after-effects of what happened centuries ago still continue.
Hopefully, readers will enjoy the tales of Roban and Dimrael.
Dimrael is a fictional country I made up for 'Unexplained Disappearances'. It's in located in West Asia. It comes in the story after Beijing, when Aria finally finds out the dark truth behind her brother's disappearance. It is considered one of the unsafest places in the world, but for Aria and her group, it's the safest refuge they could find.
Here is what Aria says about the political conditions of Dimrael-
You’d have to be living
in a cave to know just how war-torn Iyael was. Even I, who wasn’t big on
newspapers and news channels, knew that it rained white phosphorus in Iyael. It
was at war with a neighboring country over a small strip of land that they both
shared. The land was multi-cultural and multi-religious, and since the two
countries had been divided on cultural and religious lines, it was a matter of
controversy which country the area belonged to. For two nations the size of two
small Indian states, their war was pretty gruesome, taking thousands of lives
every year and prohibiting any development in an area which once used to be the
cradle of West Asian civilization.
Dimrael is also the stuff of fantasy of folklore, because hundreds of years ago, when a powerful army of Roban was slowly spreading it's control over Asia, Dimrael and its neighbors had been successful in bringing it down. The downfall of Roban changed the path the world was expected to follow, and Dimrael became a part of legend.
In the present day, Dimrael is just a worn torn country. Aria is deeply moved by the stories of destruction in Dimrael. It is this emotional attachment to Dimrael that brings about an irrevocable change in her. The rest of the story follows the new Aria, who is many times braver than the Aria that leaves home to search for her brother.
Have you ever used fictional places in your stories? A lot of writers do it all the time (Hogwarts, Panem and so on) while others stick to real places. In 'Unexplained Disappearances' I have done something that falls in neither category- I have used both real and fictional places.
The real places are India, Bangladesh and China. You might ask why I'd want to add countries to the world that don't really exist. It's because there are some things that happen in my book that have never happened in any real country, and I didn't want to manipulate history. It just feels like a really big responsibility you say The Republic of so-and-so once was the home of drug dealer and bandits, that the So-and-so civilization was wiped out thank to the villain of my story.
Do you think it works? It worked for Princess Diaries, an American from San Fransisco, where Mia Thermopolis discovers she's the princess of a country called Genovia which doesn't really exist. But I admit it can get a little confusing sometimes. Some things are real and some are not. I hope I figure it out soon enough, so I can write a good novel
Meanwhile, I've been reading Catching Fire and I LOVE it! I'll keep you updated about the fictional places I created in my next post. Till then, have a nice read!
“Ready?” asked Lahiri in an accent which didn’t
betray his lack of knowledge in English. None of us nodded or said ‘yes’, but
he still ordered the boatman to row. I held the side of the boat tightly with
my hand as a hollow feeling emptied my stomach.
For just one second, I hallucinated and on
afterthought, I deduced it was because of the tiredness. I saw myself standing
at the river bed, smiling. I looked like I did last year, before Kartik was
lost. And just as abruptly as it had come, my vision of myself vanished. I
instantly realized what my vision had been about- as I drifted away from the
river bed, I not only drifted away from my country, but also from a part of
myself.
In every successful writer's life, there comes a point where newspapers and book critics shower him or her with tons of praise, where it becomes clear their book will be on the bestseller's list for at least four weeks, when the satisfaction of having one's work read finally seeps into their life after years of hard-work and anticipation.
But before all that comes a point when a writer needs to find somebody to critiques his work with such brutal honesty that he is first moved to tears and then sits down in front of his computer to make the second draft a million times better than the first.
In the past, I have had crit partners and this is how our arrangement worked- we sent each other our work and once we were done reading, we sent each other feedback. Unfortunately, it appears all my crit partner, who are a lot older than I am, are now busy with jobs and family, which means I will now have to find another literary friend to help me see flaws in my manuscript.
So, here's an open invitation to one and all- if anybody has any free time in the twenty-four hours of the day, please, please, please read the first part of my book and tell me what you think. In return, I'd be happy to help you out in any way I can, as long as it's not illegal or immoral (okay, so the last part was meant as a joke). I could really use the help of some avid readers right now, and hopefully, by next month, I can start work on my second draft with the purpose of polishing my manuscript as much as possible.
