My Forgotten Novel: The Clock That Struck Nothing

I don't know if this counts as a novel, because I never finished the first draft.

After I wrote The Atomic Girl and before I wrote Legacy of Leporis, I came up with a YA urban fantasy called "The Clock That Struck Nothing".  Dreamed up the whole plot, even wrote a few scenes, but it never got beyond that.

I did that sort of thing when I was young. Came up with all sorts of plots for stories. Short stories got written, because they were short. Longer stories got dreamed up, weighed and either entertained me for a while, or were quickly forgotten.

TCTSN was the only novel in that time I bothered to start writing. Never finished it, as the idea behind the novel was pretty lame.

Essentially, a girl finds a curious antique clock in a shop and absolutely has to buy it. Once she gets it going, it has a funny little chime for the hour.

That night, when all the world was asleep, the clock began to chime. Not the tinkly little sound before, but great big booming belltower-type chimes. This startles the girl awake. When she looks at the clock face, the hands are gone. The clock chimes on and on, and a sparkly black cloud of magical whatever smoke comes pouring out the the clock, envelops her, and sweeps her away to a fantasy land that needs her help to save it from... whatever it was that was threatening the clock.

So yeah. That entertained my young adolescent self with magical escapist adventures where Our Heroine spends time in a place where she's truly needed and wanted. Every morning she was returned to her reality, which grew duller and duller each passing day.

Eventually she would have figured out a way to remain in the fantasy land, but the story never got that far before I abandoned it.

Completely forgot it had existed for thirty years. Wonder what made me think of it now?

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Her Grace's brain is populated by all sorts of stories.  Some of them even see the light of day, if only briefly.