Amber McNett has secrets. Did you know there is a secret underground rollerskating rink somewhere beneath the college campus, where she and her friends go and skate to the soundtrack of Xanadu? She is not allowed to divulge where it is.
McNett is also a fan of mysteries. She and her friends have been known on occasion to throw a murder mystery party or an “absurdist tea party.” Such parties have been frequented by Sherlock Holmes and a disillusioned French poet or two.
To add to the intrigue, McNett has also been known to be less than truthful about her age. In high school, she developed and shared an interactive online novel with about 50 different people. “No one knew I was 16 when I started it,” she said. “They all thought I was in my 30s. I didn’t let them know how old I was because I was afraid they’d all go away.”
Not only did they not go away, but the project got so big that she eventually needed to require applications from people who wanted to participate. In the end, what started as her attempt to alleviate high school boredom and connect with other girls her age ended up being a real writing group, including a linguistics professor and a professional science fiction writer.
“We created this really wonderful shared creative space,” she said. She started out with a really loosely created world with basic parameters, then placed an ad on a website, saying that she wanted to write it with people, create different species of animals, languages, cultures, everything. “We were just gonna start from the bottom and create this world from scratch,” she said. “And we did.”
Although she is reluctant, McNett will explain how the whole project got started. The story begins with horses and how she couldn’t have one. “So my outlet for horsiness was model horses,” she said, amidst giggles. When she was 11 or 12, she used to get Horse Illustrated, and once read an article about people who showed model horses. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. I could have my own stable with hundreds of horses,’” she said.
The details of model-horse showing are surprisingly intricate. McNett says some people go to the extent of remaking their model horses by taking blowtorches to them, re-molding and re-painting them and placing them in realistic stable-like settings, all to make them look like, yes, real horses. Then they are taken to model horse shows, where real horses judges critique them and give ribbons to the most realistic model horses. “It’s like a real horse show, only there’s no horses or manure to clean up,” she said.
After thoroughly exploring the whole model horse scene, McNett discovered a twist - a unique opportunity to combine her passion for horses with, of all things, her growing fascination with Star Trek. An ad in a model horse trade magazine caught her attention “It was these women, who’d dress up like Klingons and they would ride their horses,” she explained, “but they would dress them up like Klingon horses . . . And they would also show their model horses and they would remake them like the Klingon horses. They would add horns with epoxy and take the blowtorches and they’d repaint them.”
When she was 11, Mc Nett joined the club, pretending she was 16. The part of the club that appealed to her most was the role-playing and story writing the members did. Alas, as so often happens with organizations full of competing interests, the Klingon/horse club fell apart. “The club eventually broke up because the Klingon people got kind of ticked off – there were all these people who weren’t really into Klingons, they just liked Star Trek in general, and they were like, ‘We want more Klingons, enough of these other aliens!’” she said. “So all the people that were more interested in Star Trek in general, like me, because I never really had a Klingon thing, I had more of, like, a Commander Data thing, we all had an offshoot club and we basically wrote stories together.”
When that club also petered out, McNett got the idea for the interactive novel. “I was like, ‘I’m really bored and I like to write stories with people, but I’m tired of Star Trek and I just want to make up my own world,’” she said. “So I did.”
One of McNett’s dreams is do the same kind of project again, but commercially this time, and aimed at a younger audience. With the first interactive novel having been so successful, McNett is now off to London try to create something similar, only this time she’s going to . . . well, she’d rather not say.
—Amanda Davis