How It All Started
The Backstory of The Adventures of Ava Aldeberg
Hello there, welcome to my first Backstory post! I’m especially excited to share this with you because, frankly, it’s bizarre and quite funny (things which make for a great story). So take a load off and step into my convoluted psyche for a while and hear all about how I first came up with the idea for The Adventures of Ava Aldeberg.
Funnily enough, it didn’t start with The Adventures of Ava Aldeberg, it started back in the fall of 2022 with I Dream of Tetris (my sci-fi psychological thriller novel). I’d written the first few chapters of IDoT and decided that now was as good a time as any to submit my work for review… but where? That’s where, after hours of careful sleuthing, I came across critiquecircle.com a website of which I have MANY positive things to say, and would advise any aspiring (or experienced) writer to check out. I’ll probably do another post on Critique Circle later, detailing how I managed to make it work for me and what I got out of it, but that’s not what this post is about.
SO I put up IDoT for review and I was… deeply discouraged by the feedback I received. I was a new writer, and my skin was very thin. I’d literally worked and reviewed what I submitted five times over—and then five times again (because I was nervous) and still my grammar was not up to par, and my plot was difficult to follow. And multiple people told me that. What made it even worse was that I went to return the favor to those who had critted my story before reading the feedback they gave me (a mistake I never repeated again). I found that users story incredibly difficult to follow, but I persevered because I thought I was being courteous in returning the feedback… when I went to read their feedback for me, they’d made it 3 paragraphs in before commenting that they “couldn’t finish my story because the grammar was so bad”… I wanted to die. And that’s not to say that all the feedback I received on my first chapter was bad, but the general consensus was; my story had some nice parts but as a whole it didn’t make sense and the grammar wasn’t solid.
I decided to focus on learning how to give feedback properly for a while, of which plenty of users were happy to tell me what to and not to say to them as feedback (post on that is yet to come), and didn’t post anything of my own for review. In fact I didn’t have anything of my own to put up for review, I hadn’t written anything except feedback because I didn’t think I had the writing chops to do justice to my idea… UNTIL ONE DAY someone made a forum post about feedback I’d given them. A post about what feedback to take, and what to ignore.
Yesyesyes, the poster was careful to keep me anonymous, but used part of my feedback as a specific example of feedback you should ignore. I was livid. Nevermind that I’d listed out six unfulfilled themes and three inverted tropes that were never set up for or paid-off in the short story (and I bothered to say that it was very difficult to invert one trope in the span of a short story, much less invert three), the poster decided to fixate on the one offhand reader-reaction I made in response to a creepy witchy scene: “this is gross” Which may well have been the intent of the scene—I don’t know, that’s just what the scene made me feel (which is why reader-reactions are so valuable btw, but more on that later.)
That fateful forum post shook whatever insecurities I had from my prior feedback away. She liked fairy tales? Fine. I’d write a fairy tale and show her! My feedback was clearly not worth ignoring (and obviously the gospel truth—even if it was mostly full of opinions), and I’d prove it by writing a better fairy tale than her. She’d have to read it to return the feedback I’d given her and then when confronted with my exceptional skill would be forced to acknowledge (to herself, if not to me), that my feedback was correct and I was WORTH listening to. Thus I plotted out my revenge.
I had an idea for a fairy tale. It was ridiculous, but I had it. And if I could pick out actual themes and tropes and things that weren’t paid off, then I could totally write a half-way descent story based on a fever dream I had about Captain Hook. The fever dream in question happened a few years prior while I was sick with a sinus infection, and it was… a trip. And you can still see it clearly in the first few chapters of The Adventures of Ava Aldeberg, but only if you know what you’re looking for:
My fever dream started, as most fever dreams do, with a heavy dose of NyQuil. I fell asleep, and then promptly was immersed in a strange world where: Captain Hook had to smuggle me into Neverland on Meghan Markle’s boat (because she had diplomatic immunity—obviously). But oh no! just when I was about to make it to shore behind the Duchess of Sussex’s entourage, the Harbor Master arrived to greet her! Captain James said I’d have to slide out of the row-boat and hide under the docks until the Harbor Master left and then go ashore. So out of the boat I slide and under the water I went. It started to rain. And then I started to drown because of the rain and high tide (the water rose and the dock trapped me under). But never fear! A mermaid came to save me, just like they did in Hook. She swam up to me, gave me the kiss of life, and told me “it’s ok, just breathe. Just breathe.” And then I woke up face down in my pillow and breathing very deeply into it.
So that was my fairy tale, it was all there, I just had to write it. It shaped up quickly because I was really only left with two decisions to make:
why am I going to Neverland?
I decided that obviously the only reason I need to be smuggled into Neverland (under the cover of someone else’s diplomatic immunity), was because I was a spy. So that one was easy. Except that now I had to have a mission… and a lead… and a skill set (this actually ended up being a very poor creative choice that I had to do a lot of work to backtrack on because I kept trying to fit it in—BUT THAT’S FOR ANOTHER POST)
what happens after I can breathe underwater?
I decided that it would be much simpler and a tidier ending for my short story if I were turned into a mermaid instead of continuing on my unknown spy mission. Much simpler and more interesting. (I still couldn’t tell you why I made the choice to write about mermaids, I’d never have considered a mermaid one of my top fantasy creatures before writing this short story).
Off I went a-writing, and turned out 5k words of a short story I called The Agitator and the Buccaneer (the title I still use for that grouping of chapters in the story). I posted it for review and suddenly the feedback I got wasn’t crushing. I was less precious about this idea, so it made it easier to learn how to accept feedback and how to understand where people’s reactions to the story differed from what I was trying to convey. It became an invaluable learning tool for me, and suddenly I wanted to write more of the story—because I wanted to write and finally I’d found something I could tolerate feedback on! So I wrote A Whale of a Tale as a sequential stand alone short story… and then I wrote a third short story because the mermaid bit was fun and did well enough, time to tackle the mission my spy was sent to solve! After Needs Must, and Pixie Dust I ran into a problem: the short story format stopped working. I had to rely on too much backstory to keep the readers up to speed and it made for a lot of repetition. So The Adventures of Ava Aldeberg transformed from a series of short stories into a novel.
I am now 120k words into said novel and have run into another problem: this is really too large a book for middle-grade readers (who have always been my target audience). So I’ve made the decision to split it up once again into a series. This is largely inspired by Treasure Island, because short novels can be just as fantastical and adventurous as longer ones. And I could make the first novel much more adventurous if it were it’s own novel and not just the introduction to get to the adventure. I’d actually be able to have the pirate adventures make it onto the page instead of in the background. I could make the story long, but approachable by having a series of short books. Shorter books would also ensure that the story reaches the middle-grade reading level I’m set on writing to. And it wouldn’t require a huge editing effort to get there, simply a different publishing strategy.
Thanks for making it this far. I hope you enjoy The Agitator and the Buccaneer (posted chapter by chapter), or at least enjoy hearing me talk about it.
Yours in FEWer Fellowship,
Frances-Elane
