Welcome to Gaia! ::

I have never posted any part of this project anywhere; most of my close friends don't even know I've been writing it. Since I'm coming so close to the end of it now, I wanted to start sharing a little more information about it.

About the Project: I got a rough, general idea for this novel in my final year of high school, three years ago, and I've been working on it off and on for the past two years. This summer, I want to finally finish off the first draft and start the editing. Ideally, I'd like to be ready to start querying agents by September, but that may be too optimistic.

Plot Summary: Jane Hale is an ordinary girl. She's so dreadfully dull, in fact, that she bores her own parents to tears, and in a desperate attempt to finally make her do something interesting they pluck her from her comfortable private school and enroll her in the noisiest, most chaotic public high school they can find.

A disastrous attempt at lunchtime matchmaking lands Jane in a fake romance with Billy, a mysterious boy with multicolored hair and an unusual affinity for limes. When Jane finally gets up the nerve to ask him what he's constantly writing about in the tiny, leather-bound notebook he's always carrying, he leads her down into the school's basement and calmly explains to her that he's been housing a secret connection to an expansive virtual world in an unused closet. Jane steps in and is transported to the world of Fio Fieri, an immersive virtual world with no rules and nothing ordinary to be found. She takes on the fiery persona of "Luala", and aids Billy's alter-ego, "Quasari", as he struggles to keep order in the lawless world.

Just as two of the biggest factions in Fio Fieri are on the verge of declaring war, Billy disappears without a trace. In a desperate attempt to find him, Jane is forced to send the virtual world she both loves and hates crashing into total chaos, and take off on a world-wide search for her friend with only the aid of total strangers she's met in the online world.

Before she can get to him, however, Jane must endure heartache, betrayal, shock, and the horrifying revelation that the ordinary girl she thought she was may be slipping away forever.

Current Word Count: 80 038

The Rules of Fio Fieri

1. You can die. Characters can die, and once they're dead, the user is locked out of Fio Fieri for one hundred days. When that time is up, the user may create a new character.

2. Users creating a new character are given one of three possible rebirths - the Everyman Birth, the Hero and Villain Birth, or the Mystic birth, with the Mystic birth being the rarest by far. Everymen have no special powers or abilities. Heroes and Villains are assigned an AI partner, and are given either authority in Fio Fieri or access to the seedy criminal world. Mystics have the ability to alter the game without any programming. Players typically try to conceal which rebirth they've had.

3. Players may create AI characters for various purposes and do with them as they see fit.

4. Every player wears a set of dog tags while in-game at all times. The tags indicate the character's log in, date of creation, and rebirth type.

5. Currency is acquired through all experiences. Mundane or routine activities carry little reward - novel experiences are richly rewarded.

6. Everything else goes.