Here's the opening of something I've been working on for about four months. It's a novella following two competitors at the World Memory Championships who discover someone has been using mnemonic techniques to plant false memories in competitors. Half competitive sports novel, half psychological thriller. --- **Excerpt:** The palace in Jin's mind was her grandmother's house in Chengdu, enlarged and made permanent by seven years of deliberate construction. She had added rooms her grandmother never had: a library off the kitchen, a garden that connected to a courtyard that connected to a street full of stationary people whose faces she had memorised and placed there like insects pinned for display. She walked it now in the darkness of the examination hall, collecting numbers. Each digit had a person assigned to it — a system she'd inherited from the German school and modified until it fit her own memory like custom shoes. The four was her uncle. The eight was a woman she'd seen in a documentary about the Aral Sea. The two was herself at age six, doing something specific that she refreshed every January so it wouldn't fade. Eight hundred digits in four minutes was the world record. She wasn't trying for the record today. She was trying to understand why, three sessions ago, she had remembered something that hadn't happened. --- Questions for the community: 1. Does the memory palace setup feel rushed or is the detail level right? 2. The false memory subplot — interested or eye-roll? 3. POV: I'm alternating between Jin and her main rival Tomás. Thinking third person limited. Does the excerpt suggest anything about voice I should lean into?
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