This is the story of April May and New York Carl

Last November I started writing a story about a young woman who finds a robot on her commute from school. This chance encounter becomes a rather big deal in her life, and also in the lives of pretty much everyone else on the planet. 

I really like the story, and I'm quite a ways into it, but I have a problem. I'm not used to creating in a vacuum. When you make YouTube videos, you go from idea to completion in less than a week...sometimes less than a day. Books are massive undertakings and creating them without feedback has left me feeling stranded and insecure. 

I want to be clear that the chapters you will be receiving are in no way final. It is possible that this story will never be completed. It is possible this story will be published in a very different form. It is possible that major plot points will completely reconstruct themselves. Genders may switch. Events may turn themselves backward...the stuff I will be sharing here is VERY VERY ROUGH.

I am not sharing a completed project, I am sharing a process. 

Because of that, I didn't want to share this with everyone on Earth. I wanted to have some criteria for people who are interested not just in the story but in the process of its creation. People who understand that this is a draft and won't be super angry and disappointed when it never gets completed or is published with an entirely different ending or whatever. 

So there must be a barrier...even if it's a minimal one.

Note: There will be no more than two chapters per month.

The story is written for people 15+ Here's the current prologue:

Hi. I’m April May, which I’m sure my parents thought would be adorable and which probably would have been had I turned out adorable. I like to think that my worldview is not a direct rebellion against being affixed to a punny name for the last 19 years. I mean, I don’t even dislike puns. I think puns are fine, though I find that whether they’re funny is mostly a matter of timing...I like them to be...PUNctual.

See?!

I just don’t want to BE a pun. I am acutely aware that, before this insanity began, if you Googled my name you did not find me, you found a busty pink-haired secretary from the Japanese video game series “Ace Attorney” who, upon taking the witness stand, dazzled the jury with lines like “Oooh? Oh ho ho. Mmmrrrrrph! Ooooorrrrrrrggggghhhhhhh... hhh!!! What's it to you, porcupine-head!? That stupid clock doesn't matter, okay!? She did it! And she should die for it! Die!”

I’m not kidding, I copied that directly out of the Ace Attorney Wikia page.

So that’s one thing that came out of this: Now when you Google my name you get me. Pages and pages and pages of me! Not that there aren’t other good things about suddenly being the, like, most famous human being in the world. But mostly it sucks. This is pretty difficult to explain to a world that idolizes fame for its own sake but, in addition to being famous, I’ve met lots of famous people and the consensus of all of the ones that aren’t icky is that fame is the worst part of success.

Look at me, words of wisdom already.

Though, if we’re being honest, my least favorite part of success so far wasn’t fame, it was being brutally murdered by an angry mob. I think. It’s still a little unclear to me. But I can tell you that it was /unpleasant/.

And that’s probably what you’re here for, right? You want me to jump to the juicy bits? Well, you can if you want to...chapter 16. Go ahead, I won’t judge. But this is my story, so I get to tell it the way I want to, because hopefully that will make my decisions a lot easier to understand, even if they turned out to be absolutely horrible.