Afterworlds by scott westerfeld6/7/2023 The third paragraph was pure flattery, because Darcy wanted very much for the Underbridge Literary Agency to say yes to her. 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.
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