Books I Have Written (or tried to write)

I saw a list like this posted by Joshua Palmatier and found it entertaining to read and to think about. This is essentially my book writing history, starting with my first attempt at writing a novel, when I was in fourth grade. Fortunately, that notebook is long gone, so I can't humiliate myself Lyda-style by posting an excerpt. I'm going to just post what I remember. I worked on all of these long enough to consider them novel attempts, but everything before #9 is unfinished unless otherwise noted.

1. Justin, The Horse With Blue Eyes

I wrote this in fourth grade and never, alas, made it all the way to the ending. It involved a mute child and a helpful friend and a talking white horse that was clearly borrowed from the same part of the universal subconscious as the Companions from Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar. The plot was loosely based on the TV version of Puff, the Magic Dragon. If I still had it and showed it to Molly, I'd bet $10 she'd think it was AWESOME and would nag me to finish it, probably for months.

Useful take-home lesson from this writing project: if you revise before you finish the way the helpful adults tell you to, you may never actually finish.

2. The Jail Story

So, at my school, starting in middle school, we got to read our creative writing out loud to the group. One of the other students discovered that the best way to keep everyone's attention and establish an enthusiastic fan base was to use your classmates as characters. His story shifted the entire classroom, including the teachers, to an oppressive orphanage. I decided this was a good idea, but went for marginally more realism by having our entire class somehow winding up locked in Juvie and then breaking out. I was 11 or 12 when I wrote this. It had an ending!

Useful take-home lesson: have characters that your target audience can easily identify with. And when you're twelve, no one will object to straight-up pandering.

3. The Random Assorted Adventures of Sara aka Ruth

I wrote this on my own (by which I mean, not for school) starting at age 13 and continuing through at least my freshman year of high school. I do still have this. At some point I ripped it all out of the Mead notebooks and stuck it in chronological order in three-ring binders and then counted pages, and there were hundreds of pages here.

Sara/Ruth was a Jewish teenager who lived in a variety of usually Polish cities and was born sometime around 1925. In various episodes, she participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; was deported from the Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz, from which she later escaped; used false papers to fake being a gentile and get a job as a secretary for some high-ranked Nazi, on whom she spied; and lived in the woods with the Jewish Partisans. After liberation by the Soviets, she tried to emigrate to Palestine but through a serious of incredibly contrived and wildly unlikely events, she found herself packed off to a British boarding school where she hung around for a year being angstful and mysterious. She did ultimately succeed in getting to Palestine, where she joined one of the less-violent resistence group (the Haganah? am I remembering my pre-Israeli-Independence resistence groups correctly? or was the Haganah something else?), married, and had children. I took her all the way up to the present day, writing only the big, climactic, emotional scenes because those were the fun bits.

Ruth's adventures were heavily influenced by the Leon Uris novel Exodus along with the movie, which I saw on video with my family at some point.

Useful lesson: write in order or you'll never go back and fill in the "boring" bits. Also, writing can be fun and satisfying even when you're not showing it anyone.

4. Lady/Warrior/Princess

I worked on this for a while in high school. I don't remember much beyond the title, except I'm pretty sure the lead character was captured by the Bad Guys on page one and was going to be sacrificed to a Dark God. Or something. Maybe I shouldn't list this, but I wrote at least twenty pages and it was the first attempt that involved a word processor. This may exist somewhere on my father's hard drive. It's definitely not on mine.

Useful lesson: print stuff out if you want to keep it. Today's electronic media will be as useless someday as the 5 1/4 inch disk where this is probably saved.

5. The Water Beads

This story was inspired by a visit to the Badlands in high school and involved a society that had been subjugated by a group that had magically bound up their water in a necklace. It involved a lost princess who was the prophesied chosen one, or something along those lines, and cool warrior women who practiced their sword-fighting in the desert sun. I wrote it while we drove across the Dakotas. My brother and sister read over my shoulder and begged for more.

Useful lesson: never throw ideas away.

6. Oh look, I've been mysteriously transported to a fantasy universe with all my high school friends!

OK, this was actually a short story. As such, it even had an ending.

Useful lesson: high school sucks. As coping techniques go, fantasizing about living in an alternate reality is a pretty good one.

7. Oh look, I've been mysteriously transported to a fantasy universe with all my college friends!

This was intended as a novel but wound up shorter than the short story, since college was actually pretty time-consuming. Also, in college, I discovered RPGs.

Useful lesson: don't play RPGs or you will never write again.

7b. Oh look, it's a story in a fantasy universe with my alter-ego and the alter-egoes of all my college friends, and everyone has come to play. This is awesome, I may never do homework again. had a print copy for years and years, but I think he finally tossed it. There are at least a half-dozen people on my friendslist who participated in this.

Useful lesson: story conflict is key to moving things along. Ramp up the conflict; don't resolve it too fast.

8. The Planet of the Lost Catholics

This was the actual working title. I wrote almost none of this, but tried repeatedly and spent a ton of time brainstorming, researching, etc. The premise involved a lost colony. The colony has a society where people would marry their platonic best friend and have a celibate home life -- they could screw anyone BUT the person they were married to. The colony was cut off long enough to forget that this was not the norm back on earth. Then recontact is made.

I still think this is kind of a fun idea for a society, but there was absolutely no plot here. I tried and tried to write this one before I figured that out.

Useful lesson: scenario is not enough. You need a conflict and a plot or all you've got is a travel guide.

9. Magefire

While I was in college, I wrote a short story about this girl at a music conservatory who gets a mysterious, angstful roommate with a dark secret. It got rejected by both MZB and Weird Tales with a note saying that it read more like chapters 1 and 36 of a novel. So I decided to turn it into a novel, figuring that I knew how it started and how it ended. Then I went through about 20 false starts in which I tried to use the short story as a first chapter. That did not work. When I finally started from page 1, it flowed surprisingly well.

When I finished it, I called it Turning the Storm. I rewrote it a bunch of times, and finally sold it to Bantam, who split it into two pieces. The title I came up with for the first bit was Fires of the Faithful.

Useful lesson: You really can write a whole novel just by sitting down and writing a little bit every single day. Plus many more, too many to enumerate here.

10. Widening Gyre

This was an SF/mystery novel. I wrote it while my agent was shopping Turning the Storm around. It's finished, but I never revised it past the beta draft because TTS sold shortly after I finished it. Bantam was not interested in buying SF from me, so I trunked it until I had time. I have time now, but I've been more interested in other projects. Maybe I'll take another whack at it when I'm ready to send out Castaways.

Useful lesson: experimenting with style and genre is a good thing. You may not sell it, but you'll learn and grow as a writer.

11. Freedom's Gate, 12. Freedom's Apprentice, 13. Freedom's Sisters

I wanted to write more fantasy after writing Widening Gyre anyway, and I wanted to write something with the theme of redemption. Mulling it over on a walk with Ed, I started thinking about using the water bead story. It changed a hell of a lot, of course. The bitchy lost princess was replaced by Tamar, and the righteous bad-ass warrior woman was replaced by Lauria. Who is bad-ass and a warrior woman but starts off as a bad guy.

Useful lesson: You can write a novel in a year while pregnant and parenting a two-year-old. You can write a novel in a year while caring for a newborn and a three-year-old. You can write a novel in a year while caring for a one-year-old and a four-year-old. But holy shit, is it ever a lot of work.

14. Holy Week

Wiccan woman living in Minneapolis unexpectedly inherits Ark of the Covenant. My agent is shopping this around.

Useful lesson: it takes longer to write a book when you don't have a deadline.

15. Castaways

Juvenile SF with girl protagonist. Molly LOVED this and thinks I am BRILLIANT and the best writer in the WORLD. Of course, she depends on me to buy her art supplies, so her opinions may be suspect.

Useful lesson: it is really fun to have your kid bugging you for more pages to read. In fact, this whole novel was really fun to write.

(For all the useful lessons, the "you" would in fact be "me." You know, that sort of "you." The you sort of you might in fact be able to combine writing and RPGs just fine or might not need to write in order or whatever. Whatever works for you, by which I mean either one of us, is fine.)