Title: Merged
Author: Jim Kroepfl, Stephanie Kroepfl
Publisher: Month9Books
Publication date: September 17, 2019
Genres: Young Adult, Science Fiction
Seven of our country’s most gifted teens will become Nobels, hosts for the implantation of brilliant Mentor minds, in an effort to accelerate human progress.
But as the line between what’s possible and what’s right draws ever blurrier, the teens discover everything has a cost.
Scientists have created an evolved form of living known as Merged Consciousness, and sixteen-year-old Lake finds herself unable to merge with her Mentor.
Lake, the Nobel for Chemistry and Orfyn, the Nobel for Art, are two from among the inaugural class of Nobels, and with the best intent and motivation. But when Stryker, the Nobel for Peace, makes them question the motivation of the scientists behind the program, their world begins to unravel.
As the Nobels work to uncover the dark secrets of the program’s origins, everyone's a suspect and no one can be trusted, not even the other Nobels.
As the Mentors begin to take over the bodies and minds of the Nobels, Lake and Orfyn must find a way to regain control before they lose all semblance or memory of their former selves.
GUEST POST
The world of … (World Building)
World building is more than setting, it’s more than the rules and minor characters that govern a protagonist’s situation, it’s more than time, place and tone; it’s how everything except other major characters affect how the main character behaves and makes decisions in the story.
Winston Churchill was speaking of architecture when he said, “We make our buildings, and then our buildings make us.” That is a part of world building. The feeling you can convey in a southern prison is vastly different from conveying a laboratory on the moon.
So many novels used to begin with a detailed description of weather, or the place where the story takes place, or the events that led up to the story beginning. These are effective in developing the feeling or setup of the story, but the reason we read fewer “dark and stormy nights” isn’t so much that we’ve read them all before, but because the importance of world building isn’t the world, it’s how that world will affect the main character. Unless you’re writing a man-against-nature conflict, the weather doesn’t carry enough importance to be the first thing provided to the reader.
World building is creating the built-in obstacles of the story that the protagonist will have to overcome to succeed. In a prison, you have to show the guards, you have to show the watchtowers, and you have to show the ever-oppressive vigilance and determination of the warden. In a moon laboratory, you have to show the difficulty in doing things outside, you have to show the fragility of the system that is keeping people alive in a lunar environment, which includes the temperature, the lack of oxygen, the lack of light, the complete lack of support from sources on earth.
Another vital thing to achieve in world building is conflict. This includes tension between characters, tension between rules, and tension between settings. In our book “Merged,” most of the story takes place in a closed boarding school that has been renovated to a modern laboratory. We have the picturesque brick school building and overgrown grounds that evoke a simpler time with wonderful ideals, but inside, the school has been transformed into a modern lab with white walls, cameras and microphones, and minor characters that have an agenda not aligned with that of our main characters. This baked-in conflict highlights the challenges of the protagonist both explicitly and implicitly.
This is one of the reasons you rarely see parents in a young adult or middle grade novel. If parents are part of the world, they limit the power of the story, unless they present another obstacle to your characters. We have a motto when we’re plotting a novel: kill the mother. That’s not just to remove an inconvenient character, it creates a more challenging world for the protagonist.
One more thing to remember about world building. When you start to consider it as an active element of the story, you need to bring it to life. Whether that is the setting, minor characters, or even the weather, you have to describe it in such a way that the main character, and the reader, can feel it. A dark and stormy night is one thing, roaring wind and rain pounding on the roof so loud your protagonist can’t hear someone breaking in through the back door, quite another.
Jim and Stephanie Kroepfl are a husband-and-wife team who write stories of mystery and adventure from their cabin in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. When they aren’t dodging moose, their story ideas appear during their walks with their dog, who far prefers chasing balls to plotting novels. Jim and Stephanie are world travelers who seek out crop circles, obscure historical sites and mysterious ruins.
My name is Vanessa a.k.a. Queen Alchemy. I am a 30-something-year-old mother of four nerdy, fantastic children. We live in the Midwest. I have a reading addiction, and I hope that I never recover! I'm the hugest nerd you can find with interests not limited to the following: comics (Batman and Captain America for the win!), science, computers, zombies, unicorns, Harry Potter, cartoons from the 80's & 90's, Frankenstein, history, crafting, cooking & baking, Star Wars, digital scrapbooking, D&D, Minecraft, Hello Kitty, horror, metalcore, royalty, tattoos & piercings, bright colors, and so much more!
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