A Very Very Brief Excerpt of NEXT BOOK
310 of the current 13,093 words. ALL OF THESE WORDS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
I haven’t named Ellen’s Slack friends yet. But I have begun to suss out their personalities.
ellen.everton: so hypothetically
ellen.everton: if you had the chance to go to Narnia or fairyland or whatever
ellen.everton: would you?
NAME NAME 1: HUNDO PEE
NAME NAME 1: BRING ON THE QUEST
NAME NAME 1: I WILL DRAW MY SWORD AND FIGHT
ellen.everton: what if you don’t know how to do a sword
NAME NAME 1: there’ll be a training montage
NAME NAME 2: idk do you really want to be Frodo though, or Bilbo
NAME NAME 2: it wasn’t all second breakfasts
NAME NAME 3: more like second breakfasts and PTSD
NAME NAME 3: if you examine the literature, you’ve got, like, “everyone dies and they dance around in Aslan heaven” (Narnia) “everyone learns that fantasy kingdoms are a lot harder to govern than they thought” (The Magicians, also a lot of people die) “everyone gets kicked back into their own worlds and they spend their lives struggling to adjust” (6/7 of Narnia, Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children, potentially stuff like Neverwhere and LOTR)
NAME NAME 3: (if you count the Shire as a separate world)
NAME NAME 2: but that’s how the hero’s journey goes according to Joey C: you always end up home again
NAME NAME 2: what’s that TS Eliot quote about returning and seeing the place you once knew as if for the first time
ellen.everton: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” thanks Google
NAME NAME 2: there you go
ellen.everton: so the question then becomes: is it worth it to do the exploring
NAME NAME 1: did you not read the quote you just copy-pasted
NAME NAME 1: WE SHALL NOT CEASE
NAME NAME 1: it can’t be not worth it because you can’t not do it
Also, for those of you following me on Twitter and wondering how this book can have both a mysterious old house with a bunch of secret doors and, like, Slack, let me remind you that this is 2019, we can have all of this AND MORE. ❤️