My Abandoned First Novel 3.2.22

     Rather than a blog about some topic I thought I'd plop down for story time. I've been circling over notes over a few projects I'm working on (one mustn't have just one project on their plate) and came across research notes on a novel I wanted to be my first novel. I see this as a good opportunity to reveal a little bit on the writing process and the lessons learned when a project falls through. 

    Spoiler: You've got to pick yourself up and keep on moving with the next one. 

    I've started kicking around the idea of writing a novel for many, many years. The seeds of that were sprouting in my head starting in middle school but never really ventured out from the short stories that I was writing. In high school I've had a few jump starts but never anything came of those ideas either. It wasn't until late 2017 early 2018 that I had seriously considered writing a full length book. At that point, I've written quite a bit of short stories, short film scripts, a couple plays, plenty of comic book scripts, and a landfill of bad poetry. 

    So throughout 2018 and 2019 I was cracking down on potential ideas that could be expanded upon the length of a novel. It had to hit that specific word count. For those that don't know, different word counts classify works into different formats depending on how short or long it is. I typically follow the Nebula Award word count guidelines when they separate each category. To this day I have this taped in front of my desk for inspiration: 

Novel - 40,000+ words

Novella - 17,500 - 39,999 words

Novelette - 7,500 - 17,499 words 

Short Story - Up to 7,500 words 

and then sometimes there's

Flash Fiction - Less than 1,000 words 

    I've written plenty of flash fiction, a lot of short stories, and even hit the novelette mark, but never anything larger than that. So I thought taking on an ensemble cast would thicken up that word count. Over the summer of 2018 I came up with three ideas that could probably work well as novels. Two of which I could/will probably end up doing. Those three are:

Rain Forever Falling - A group of friends return to their rainy hometown when supernatural occurrences match an ill-fated summer twenty years prior. To come to terms with their traumas, they must first swim through dark waters from their childhoods and all the insidious creatures that inhabit it. 

Out of Time - All seems to be running smoothly at a newly-established assisted living facility when a mysterious figure shows itself and slowly unravels all the lives within the facility's proximity. 

Shelter

    Notice I didn't put down the plot for that one. A funny story that one. It was the summer of '18 when I had this hatchling of a story involving nuclear fallout and a family slowly dying from radiation sickness. Hilarious good romp of a time, I know. I intended that one to be a short story since an entire novel of sadness and dying seemed in mean spirits. So I added some characters that could possibly make it out alive. Then I added more to it and thought a genre shift from sci-fi to a neat fantasy horror would be more mysterious and interesting. Instead of a nuclear bomb demolishing the land, it would be a plague branching off an ominous creature... You can see where I'm going with this, yeah?

    So for most of '19 I research and meditate on the idea while I wrote down notes and plotted Shelter at a leisurely pace. March, 2020 came around and you can fill in the rest. It was obvious I had to put away the idea away forever, if not for a long time. The year after I didn't even think about writing a novel because I just felt deflated putting in all the time for the one book only for it to be thrown away before it was finished. Now I have the mentality of "if it isn't working out, move on to the next one." It's definitely a lot more healthier than clinging onto something for dear life. 

    It's now March '22 and I'm juggling band stuff, short stories, comic book scripts, film scripts, this blog, and poetry stuff. It's only been lately I've come around once more to the idea of a novel. Just for me, so that I can say I did it. Not sure what will be my foot in the door because I write so many things, but continue to write I shall! Never fear to get on with it friends, because self-doubt in the face of defeat can spread like a .... uh, yeah. 

    I'll never say never about going back to this idea. It really fascinated me on where I was going. It took on this nature versus man power struggle. There was this folklore element on the origin point of a disease. A mystery where you didn't get all the answers. Damn, it could've been unique. Perhaps not great, or even good as it still was a first novel, but unique. Maybe someday I'll return to this idea when the thought of a plague tale wouldn't be in bad taste or exhausting to think about. Maybe one day. 

    But until then, I've got to pick myself up and keep on moving with the next one.