First draft completed: 'Cursed Queen' (2019-20)

[ID: a screenshot of the word count display on Microsoft Word that reads Page 1 of 139 and 105,210 words]

The initial draft of my first novel, Cursed Queen, was completed in March 2020 after several months of hard work, including 50,000 words written in November 2019 as my NaNoWriMo 2019 project. Standing at a rather gargantuan 105,000 words total, it has a long editing process ahead of it, but the achievement of completing a full-length novel at age 16/17 is still very meaningful!

Cursed Queen is a Young Adult high fantasy novel, the first in a planned trilogy that also includes Lost King and Broken Crown - books two and three respectively. It follows Del and Merrin, a human sister and brother who find themselves lost in the territory of mysterious and bloodthirsty faeries fighting a terrible war for survival. There, in the darkness of the enchanted forest, they will find lost boys, terrible secrets and powerful forces of nature unlike any they've ever seen before.

[ID: a short 8-second video showing a paperback book being flipped through a few pages at a time]

Printed in paperback form for posterity, Cursed Queen's first draft was the highest passion of my life for a significant amount of time. Retrospectively, there are definite aspects of it that are uninspired, derivative and immature. Given it was written by a teenager with a teenager's limits on life and literary experience, however, I'm willing to give it a pass. Characters in the novel such as Kieran, the cursed human boy stolen at birth and raised in the alien world of the faeries, and Sasha, the unlikely girl called to a higher purpose by hidden powers in mountains, have elements about them that are startling and compelling. 

In some ways, I'm not entirely sure what my future plans for Cursed Queen are. As easy as it would be to pass it off as merely a part of my growth as a writer, parts of it still feel as if they have future potential. 

*   *   *

Read an excerpt from the first draft 'Cursed Queen' (2019-20)...

[ all rights reserved A.F. Fitts 2020 ]

Chapter Five – Del 

Everything seemed to go oddly silent once she was in the forest. It was dark – darker than she’d expected – and the foliage above was so thick the light from the setting sun barely made it to the ground. She didn’t stop until she was sure she was no longer being followed, until everything was so quiet she was certain it was safe to slow down. Her lungs were screaming, her head was dizzy and- skies, her shoulder hurt. She reached a tentative hand up to touch the wound. When she brought it away, her fingers were covered with blood.

“Damn!” she spat, gritting her teeth from the pain.

The first thing she heard was a heavy breathing sound from behind her. She spun around instantly, shoulder screaming in pain again, and cried out. Something hit her hard in the chest, sending her stumbling backwards and falling down against the trunk of a silver birch. When she looked up, she saw the eyes of the person – the thing – that had struck her. It was worse than the wolf-beast, worse than the worst thing she had ever seen in her life.

It was as if someone had taken Lorrie’s pet goat and stretched it out into more man-like proportions and gifted it the ability to walk on its hind legs. It had horrible, long-fingered hands. In its disturbing eyes – orange marked with a rectangular pupil – she saw something beyond life. She saw awareness. It went to swing at her again and she threw her hands in front of her face in a feeble attempt to protect herself. There was a flash of light and she heard the thing cry out in pain. The air had grown hot and she opened her eyes to see the goat-man reeling backwards, clutching its face and roaring. After a moment it turned back to her, its fury filling the space between them.

This was a dream, it had to be a dream. The goat-man took a step towards her, hands outstretched, then wham. Something hit it from behind, and Del shielded her face and red blood spattered her. When she lowered he hands, she saw a long blade sticking out through the goat-man’s chest. Gasping horribly, the goat-man fell to the ground, its blood soaking into the bracken. Standing above it, another figure-

“I’m sorry,” said a voice, “I didn’t think the blood was going to go so far.”

Del was looking at the face of a man. He looked human. Almost human, she amended, because there was something about him that made her… unsure. His skin was a warm beige and his angular eyes a beautiful deep brown, lined with dark make-up. Black hair fell to around his shoulders, and he seemed quite young. But it was his clothes that struck her. They were navy blue and looked like they were thick, heavy material. She thought they seemed to be robes of some sort, paired with brown leather amour and tall boots. The air around him was still. Very, very still.

“Are you okay?” he asked slowly, as he thought she couldn’t understand him. He had a curious, slightly bewildered look in his eyes. She didn’t respond to his question, too shocked by the body of the goat-man in front of her and struggling to think over the pain in her shoulder.

“Are you okay?” he repeated, concerned.

Of course not, she thought bitterly. Who is this idiot? “No,” she said through gritted teeth, “I’m bleeding, if you hadn’t noticed.”

He blinked. “Oh, right, sorry. Can I help you?”

Del was beginning to doubt he could. “Look,” she told him, fighting off tears, “just leave me alone, okay? I need to find my brother.”

He went to speak again but was cut off by the appearance of another person – a tall, dark-skinned woman with a bow and quiver of arrows strapped over her back. “Ara, what’s going on?” she asked the man.

“It’s a human,” he replied, gesturing at Del.

“I can see that,” the woman said dryly, looking her up and down.

“She’s also hurt,” the man – Ara – added.

The woman rolled her eyes. “Yes, I noticed. One of Kal’s awful wolf things got her while she crossing the river. I saw.” This woman must have been the one who yelled at me to wait, then. “So, human,” the woman continued, “if you are human, that is. I assume you are, and that this isn’t some trick of Kal’s.”

“Even she wouldn’t do that,” Ara said. “Too shameful. Although…”

“I am human,” Del interjected. “My name is Del.” She looked between them nervously.

The woman crouched down before her, and up close, Del saw the flecks of gold in her brown eyes. “Well, Del, my name is Cassia. This is Ara.” She pointed at the man, who was looking at Del with a curious expression on his face. Cassia reached out carefully and placed a hand on the wound on Del’s shoulder. She jumped back, flinching at the flash of pain.

“Sorry,” Cassia said. “It’ll stop hurting in a moment.”

Her fingers pressed against Del’s skin. A cool sensation began to undercut the searing pain, as if a gentle wave of soothing water was washing over the gash. Craning her neck, she stared as the wound began to close over, raw flesh disappearing beneath new skin. With a gasp, she pulled her arm away and scrambled away from Cassia. Both her and Ara were watching Del intently.

“I…” Del thought she should probably say thank you, she just couldn’t work out what had just happened. She looked down at herself – clothes wet from the river, torn and dirty, shirt stained with blood – and felt out of place next to these two people in their strange clothes. Cassia’s were red. Her gaze roved around the forest – she couldn’t now remember which way she’d come from. The goat-man’s awful corpse still lay where it had fallen. The space between the trees was dark, though she thought she could see tiny pricks of light flittering there like fireflies. In the pause, she listened out for the river. Whichever way that was, she would find Merrin.

[...]