This was the best of the three paragraphs, she was later told. Using the present tense and short sentences, Darcy set the scene, thumbnailed the characters and their motivations, and teased the conclusion. It promised skulking ghosts and the traumas that haunt families, and little sisters who are more clever than they appear. Instead, this paragraph described a terrorist attack, a girl who wills herself to die, and the bewitching boy she meets in the afterworld.
The Underbridge Literary Agency hardly needed to know that. She didn’t mention, of course, that all sixty thousand words of Afterworlds had been written in thirty days. The second paragraph of the email was about the novel Darcy had just finished. This discovery, chanced upon during an idle web search, both shocked Darcy and made certain things about her mother clearer. When Darcy’s mother was eleven years old, her best friend was murdered by a stranger. It skipped the trifling details, her dyed blue-black hair and the slim gold ring in her left nostril, and began instead with a grim secret that her parents had never told her. THE MOST IMPORTANT EMAIL THAT Darcy Patel ever wrote was three paragraphs long.
Like Darcy, Lizzie too falls in love…until a new threat resurfaces, and her special gifts may not be enough to protect those she cares about most. The Afterworld is a place between the living and the dead, and where many unsolved-and terrifying-stories need to be reconciled. Woven into Darcy’s personal story is her novel, Afterworlds, a suspenseful thriller about a teen who slips into the “Afterworld” to survive a terrorist attack.
Over the course of a year, Darcy finishes her book, faces critique, and falls in love.
But lucky for Darcy, she’s taken under the wings of other seasoned and fledgling writers who help her navigate the city and the world of writing and publishing. With a contract in hand, she arrives in New York City with no apartment, no friends, and all the wrong clothes. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Scott Westerfeld comes a “masterful” (Cory Doctorow) novel-within-a-novel that you won’t be able to put down.ĭarcy Patel has put college on hold to publish her teen novel, Afterworlds.
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