Would It Be Readable?

I have a project that I've been working on. I finished a first draft, thanks to Na No Wri Mo, but the fact that it's Na No Wri Mo means that not only does it have something of a random events plot, but a rather random concept. I got the idea from a copy editor who is related to me, and posted a tweet about a species of fanged frog that had been discovered, and asked someone write a vampire story centered around them.

The basic idea is a small group of vampires have to travel to another dimension, in order to save the world from destruction at the hands of a Final Fantasy VII plot ripoff (I hadn't played FFVII at the time of the original writing), while slowly becoming aware that they are, in fact, characters in a novel.

One of the vampires, due to a frog venom, experiences the world as a product of text. While everything seems normal to her, she can tell when letters are capitalized, and spell any word by just saying it with hyphens, etc.

It's a fun story, and I like the general idea, but it seems like there might be too many different things working at once for a general audience.

I really don't get what you mean about the frog venom. Do you mean she sees the world entirely as text?

Yes, she sees the world entirely as a product of text. It's a bit like she's playing a text adventure game, but all the time. From her point of view, the world has always been that way, so she sees nothing odd about it. It's only really noticeable in that she can tell a capital letter from a lowercase letter, and homophones don't mix her up. Although she sees the world as text, at the beginning of the book, she has not realised that she is, in fact, a character in a book.

The frog venom only relates because that's how she got that way. It forces the victim's perception into being text based. It works retroactively on all of her memories as well. So, while she only recently started seeing the world as text, she doesn't remember it being any other way.

Anything is readable with the proper incentive.

What you've written sounds like it would work best as a piece of serial faction that is sold as part of a larger anthology in which it is not required to be the feature story. Broken up into installments by the medium itself, the sort things people worry will "kick the reader out of the story" actually just give them a moment to browse the anthology before coming back to your story. Furthermore being broken up into installments actually fits the way it was written and is thus the best way to read it.

If I may make a suggestion, you seem to have two very good ideas for short stories. Most people don't realize that cool ideas such as fanged frogs are actually Act I twists. Superman was originally a reporter who would likely find something newsworthy in the course of the story. The reader at the time would be willing to let the story happen, and then the twist that he was secretly an alien with superhuman strength caught the reader by suprise and hooked him. The fact that every episode after that has to recap the fact that he has superpowers has confused an entire culture of writers.

Having little Johnny go down to the pond with his friends has enough potential for mischief that a reader will continue until the fanged frogs jump out at them. Having the frogs be vampires builds momentum, and pretty soon you have a whole story just waiting to be made into a B-Movie. Likewise having a girl experience everything via a text can be very interesting, especially if she has something like a cybernetic implant that encodes data as text. However, to really make her shine would require a plot that actually took advantage of her ability to "spot" language. Such a plot is hard to build into a larger narrative, and since you said Na No Wri Mo, I'm guessing you tried to put several cool ideas into one long novel.

The problem is that you may not have given each idea enough impact, or may have continued to use it after the reader was willing to move on. Short stories make it easier to do this, but putting both of them into an Act II run through a swampland as local flavor to a world hopping narrative doesn't allow either of them to really shine. A snake bite and hallucinations would have sufficed for the middle low point of the story, and unless you made the world jumping into a good strong hook and added similar twists to each world it might feel like you just sort of dropped your ideas into the middle of the story.

Dropping ideas in works well in installments because they spice things up for new readers and help everyone get back into the story, but an Act II swamp is where people expect the group needs to use everything they've gained thus far to get out, and then one of them is "incapacitated." The text-adventure thing doesn't exactly cripple anyone, and fanged frog are not something the characters are ready for (unless they're Crazy-Prepared) so the audience doesn't know with what emotion to react. Readable or not, you're missing out on some emotional paydays that can help keep the reader going until the big payoff.