DON'T PANIC--KartheyM's Guide For Readers

THE SUGGESTION BOX: A Complete Overview

Here is where you'll get an in-depth guide on all things "SUGGESTION BOX". 90 stories across four of these "collections" is a LOT to wade through, and they might look a little curious, so if you're wanting to know more about them, this is the right place! 

First An Explanation: I also mention this in the summaries for each book, but "The Suggestion Box" was an interactive series I ran on my blog, where I'd ask for "a name, a place, a time, and an object", with no other guidelines and specifications. Responders could be as specific or generic as they wanted. The series met with mediocre success at the beginning, but once I started adding in random pictures I found on social media, and tagging those, responses flooded in, to the point where the third iteration gave me enough material to add a new post every weekend for an entire year!

The Suggestion Box, Vol.1-- https://www.wattpad.com/story/48544240-the-suggestion-box-volume-1

The first 13 sections in this collection are my initial attempts at writing something based on suggestions people sent me. As you will probably tell, some lists worked better than others, and toward the later lists, I definitely got better at writing a scene than I was at first!

After writing for those thirteen lists individually, I wanted to put them all together into a larger story, so I pooled all the names, times, places, and objects, and divided them into five groups according to which ones worked well together. Those five groups then became the five installments in a serial story I wrote, and the parts connect to each other in a chronological tale: Part 1: A Balloon and A Butterfly is the earliest, the story of a straight-laced young man who befriends a madcap young woman intent on defying social norms; Part 2: Two Sisters chronicles the exciting life of two sisters running a bed-and-breakfast in the later nineteenth century... particularly when signs of a murder appear on their unassuming driveway. (The connection here is that the two sisters are descendants of the characters from the first part!) Further along, in the 1980's, Part 3: Golden Gate Wishes sets a heartbroken young woman in the aftermath of a bad breakup on a serendipitous path toward a young man (who happens to be the son of a famous singer referenced in Part 2!); Part 4: The Legacy takes only a small jump further into the "future" of contemporary times, about the 2010's, we'll say, and explores the struggles of generational trauma as a woman (who, in the absence of her explorer mother and scientist father, had been raised by the musician from Part 3 and his wife!) tries to contend with her daughter exhibiting some of those rebellious, inquisitive qualities she so resented in her own mother; meanwhile, the daughter herself is caught up in a series of clues left behind by her world-traveling grandmother. Finally, Part 5: The Vega Effect takes us into the future with a space-exploration horror/thriller, as a military investigator (riding a ship designed by the scientist mentioned in Part 4!) is dispatched to a faraway planetary colony, in an attempt to figure out why every colonist ended up dead in a relatively short amount of time. 

The Suggestion Box, Vol. 2: The Legend of The Ecrivaine-- https://www.wattpad.com/story/70917105-the-suggestion-box-vol-2-the-legend-of-the

For this series, I "upped the ante" on myself, and decided to write a story where each list, instead of being its own thing, would be the next installment to a larger, continuous narrative. As before, I didn't go into this knowing what I would receive from one week to the next, but as you'll soon see, I managed to work things together every time!

A reserved teenage girl on vacation with her Aunt in France is swept into an adventure of epic proportions when she encounters a strange, time-tunneling dwarf in her aunt's garden shed, and accidentally summons a dragon merely by describing him on a page. The dwarf brings her to London where she meets her reluctant guardian, and together this unlikely pair must find a magical ring and figure out how to open a portal to send the dragon back to its own world: meanwhile, a greedy businessman is also on the hunt for the ring, and he'd do anything to gain power over the Midnight Dragon... even if it means killing the Ecrivaine and everyone around her.

The Suggestion Box, Vol. 3: One Thousand Words--https://www.wattpad.com/story/84526435-the-suggestion-box-volume-3-one-thousand-words

With the success of the previous year's series, I decided that for the third year, I'd choose picture inspiration from around different groups on Facebook, and whatever list people commented on that image, I'd use the image as a thumbnail and write the scene. As I mentioned before, this worked so well that I was able to combine the methods from the first two volumes: I had a continuous plot line (Dubbed Serenity's Light) as well as individual one-scene stories. This specific link leads to all the individual stories, and I posted Serenity's Light separately.

Serenity's Light [ https://www.wattpad.com/story/84521399-serenity%27s-light-a-suggestion-box-story ] pulls together a motley group of individuals (a forest sprite, a Viking, an old woman, a museum curator, and a history professor), at the behest of a Fae warrior tasked with restoring her world's sun--a star named Serenity--to the dimension in which she lives. The star's light was stolen, and scattered throughout time in our dimension, in the form of three enchanted objects: The Sword of Strength (which grants the bearer superhuman strength and resilience), The Collar of Memory (which can erase or restore memories), and the Crown of Immortality (which grants the wearer immortality). These three objects can only be wielded together by one known to the Fae as "The Lore-Master"; on anyone else, and particularly in the hands of the Dark Fae who is also searching for them, and Serenity will never shine again, and the Fae world will suffer in darkness forever. 

The Suggestion Box, Vol. 4: A to Z Challenge-- https://www.wattpad.com/story/128124885-the-suggestion-box-vol-4-a-to-z-challenge 

For this collection, I switched it up in that I didn't get the lists from others. Instead, I decided that to participate in the "A to Z Challenge", I chose one thing for each letter (usually a character's name) from something I'd already written before--sometimes from other Suggestion Box series, sometimes from unpublished novel drafts, a few times I used the challenge to contribute to another serial I hadn't finished yet, and a few times I had a letter that didn't match any characters I had on hand, so I just wrote something new. 

The stipulation, however, was that every list--names, places, times, and objects--had to start with the letter of the week!