The Midnight Train

This was my first full-length, actually-has-a-plot, story. It was extremely rough and choppy. Now, when I say rough, I mean rough. I didn’t even use proper puncuation for the dialogue. The plot was formed, but it wasn’t executed properly; therefore, the story was all over the place. Details didn’t add up, grammar was poor, and so forth.

Because this story holds a special place in my heart, I decided I would edit it. At the time, it didn’t seem like it would be that big of a job. I thought I only needed a little editing here, a little grammar check there, but I was very, very wrong. It turned into a full-on re-write project.

It is, of course, a young romance novel. And, naturally, is a complete cliché. I’m trying to tone down the sappiness as I go along though. Enough of my rambling though, here’s a pitifully bad summary.

Aly Fawcett can’t take life at home. Her mother is in and out of the hospital with leukemia, her father drinks away his problems, and her older brother split four years ago. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since. She’s sick of everything, so at seventeen years old, she leaves.

Hunter Goodman turns eighteen in less than two weeks. He’s living in downtown Detroit with a shitty, dead-end job as a mechanic in an auto-repair shop. Living with his fighting, chain-smoking, drinking parents in a small apartment is his own personal hell. He’s too lazy, or so he says, to deal with it, so he leaves.

On the red-eye train, these two troubled teens meet completely by chance (oh, what a coincidence). Aly, a small town girl to her very core, is flustered and annoyed with Hunter’s tough, dirty front. 

When she won’t reveal to him her intended destination, Hunter gets curious and follows her in her quest to find the person she claims she’s looking for. They travel by train across several states, all the while learning about each other–and themselves–little by little.

Two strangers on a journey. For what, exactly? That’s just part of the ride.