The Fruit Basket Novels
"What if Doling was a fruit basket? And all of us were just apples."
Updates on the Stories
As of 11/27/09-Wrote down Chapter 17 in about five million places, the only thing to do is to combine it. Made a layout, the book is probably coming down to 25-ish chapters so clearly I'm not making my deadline =[ but I'm promising to finish it by the end of December.
As of 10/26/09-Chapter 15 is a work in progress. Mae's character is finally rewritten to satisfaction, so editing portion is thankfully over (for now).
How We Got Here
Well, here we are. You know, on earth. And at computers. And writing stuff. Once upon a time man appeared. Then a really long time had passed and someone thought 'hey, let's write stuff'. Someone else said 'we have no pencils'. Kink got bored and decided that was what sparked the War of 1812.
In general, though? If you were to ask the author right now at this very minute how the Fruit Basket Novels came to be, she would answer with an honest "I have no idea."
You see,the idea began to form in the summer of 2008. That's all the author remembers. The fact that it began in 2008. And the only reason she knows that is that it is on the publishing date on fictionpress.
When she wrote the first chapter of Apples, there was no point to it; she was just messing around. But then the characters began to bloom in her mind. The time period was still fuzzy but she figured that she would work that out later.
Having been around teenage boys (high school etc.) you begin to realize how their antics can either be amusing or annoying and where the line begins and ends separating the both of them. Creating Fletch, Kink and Dodger was an interesting task, forming real life situations that could still be considered humorous without going over the top and, most importantly, writing it from the boy's perspective. If anything was key here it was observation. But then, write what you know, right? In fact, a bunch of characters' names are taken from her real life (Graveline, Stockmann, Fitzgerald etc.)
The title came about because an apple was sitting across from her laptop when she began writing the first chapter. That's it, there's no particularly significant story behind it. The novel was titled Apples because, again, observation. The fruits then began to take on a new meaning; each boy's fruit tended to match their personality (Apples fit with Cade because he is the All-American Boy. Blackberries relate to Andrew because his personality is very understated and sort of mysterious, Zach goes with cherries due to his wild, borderline-reckless tendencies etc. Note: Zach's title is subject to change.)
The story began to unravel itself in a completely backwards manner. The pivotal Shakespeare line was just that, a line. Something to sound good in the summary. The heavy themes (discrimination, fear, hope, love etc.) came much later and as the story began to make more sense and form itself. These themes also brought us the time period-the author's fascination with the 40's and the amount of material one can extract from it produced a lot of the attributes the characters possess.
There are now a massive amount of unfinished notebooks with random scraps of the story that will possibly be worked in or possibly be categorized as crap and landing in the trash can. Either way, the Fruit Basket Novels have slowly taken over her life, time and ink supply. The Go Green cause hates her.
Feel free to explore the site and check out the author's profile on the fictionpress account listed at the top of the page and in the About the Author section. This website will hopefully be updated as often as possible just to keep you informed on what's going on, progress being made, pictures of the PB's and so forth.