Books I've Written or Mostly Written

Hat tip for this post idea goes to Kelly McCullough at Wyrdsmiths (who got it from someone else, who got it from someone else, as we do on the internets).


1986 - Untitled

I was 16 and had recently finished reading Piers Anthony's On A Pale Horse, and while I loved the idea of anthropomorphizing death and fate et al, what really appealed to me about trying to write my first "real" novel was the idea of creating an afterlife full of the same bullshit bureaucracy under which we live our Earthly lives. Got the whole book sketched out, but only got the first few chapters actually typed up on my Grandmother's finicky typewriter when my Earthly life got so seriously uprooted that any long writing projects had to go on hold for a while.

My plot work was really bad, but I learned I could turn a phrase and I could occasionally create a great scene. My favorite part of this story was right at the beginning, when my main character was killed in what seemed to everyone else to be a freak accident, but was revealed to the reader (never to the character, though) to be an intentional killing by a freak who had gotten so fed up with the maniacs on I-95 that he'd bought himself one of those giant old early 70s American cars built like Mack trucks, and then whenever someone would drive like a jackass, such as my main character was, *POW*. Death by car-wielding serial killer who was extremely clever about making his murders look like accidents. Well, I thought it was funny.


1989-90 - Games

Suspense thriller/sci-fi piece about a group of kids who were genetically altered in utero by a black-ops government group with the goal of creating super-powered humans who could be militarized and used in a variety of ways. The kids were let to grow up in their families of origin (who were carefully selected but not clued in) such as to be socialized normally, but they were closely tracked. The novel opened shortly after the kids hit puberty and realized that they all had special talents, then, because they were also super smart, realized they were being tracked and figured out their own backstories, then set about tracking down their trackers for revenge. Finished it, but it really sucked. This project was too ambitious for me at the time. I learned it was really hard to do multiple points of view when I was still so green as a writer.

Sentimental side note: I still have the piece of yellow legal paper that the first sentence of the first draft of this book was written on, in a box somewhere in the garage.


1991-92 - Between Light & Dark

Inspired by one of my favorite novels, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, this was a similarly themed book in the sense that it was another re-imagining of the King Arthur saga, but told primarily from the perspectives of more minor characters in the myths or minor characters that I invented. I queered it up big-time. Sir Lancelot was in love with Arthur but could never have him, and there was a smokin' hot sex scene between Lancelot and my male main character. It was supposed to be the first of a series tracing the reincarnation of the same soul (my main character, who was named Galahad, but who was not the famous Sir Galahad) over many lifetimes, the final one of which was going to be set in the Biblical Endtimes.

The gist of the theme of the series was a merging of all kinds of myths and beliefs from all over the world/throughout history, as though they were all true. I actually liked this book a lot, even though my writing was still very raw and underdeveloped. Worked really hard on getting the time period stuff down, drew maps of England, wrote the dialog in as much Old English as I could work in without driving my reader over the edge, the whole bit. Was still being way too ambitious for my undeveloped skill, though.


1995ish - The New Age

Apocalyptic cyberpunk in which the social organization of the world largely falls apart due to violence and human stupidity and only a few people survive the wars and natural disasters. I sketched out most of it and got a bit more than halfway through with writing the actual narrative before I scared myself nearly to death. And let me tell you, I can't even read that draft anymore because large chunks of what I wrote during the first third are things that have actually happened, and/or are happening now.


1996ish - A Month of Sundays

Lesbian romance. Two women meet and fall in love while staying in a French Quarter guesthouse in New Orleans. One of them has just been told she's got cancer that's likely terminal and has gone to NOLA to see another specialist, and the other one has just found out she's pregnant from the first time she's ever had heterosexual sex in her late 20s (one drunken night with her best friend, also gay) and has run away to NOLA to decide what to do about this pregnancy. I really liked this book, and I adored my characters, but the writing was still clunky, dialog still needed lots of work. Plot work improved a little.


1997ish - The End of the Road

SF&F piece about a varied group of odd people living in rural central Alaska who begin to experience a series of increasingly bizarre phenomena that seem to break the laws of physics, yet seem to have a purpose, and seem to be originating from the end of the long rural road they all live just off of. I loved this book. I finished it but the middle was kinda mushy and the ending was sketchy and underdeveloped. My character development was getting a lot better by this time, my plot work was definitely much better, and I think if I re-wrote it now I would switch it to multiple pov instead of the single character's pov I used. It would need a serious rewrite before it could go to market, though, and I'm concerned I fucked the science all up because while I'm endlessly fascinated by theoretical physics, I'm sort-of stupid about it.


1998 - Respect Among Thieves

Vampire novel about a woman in her 30s who carries the genes to become a vampire. The story traces how these are activated, and hints around at larger things and themes in her family history as regards a powerful network of vampires and their hidden relationship with human social structures. Not standard vampire genre fiction t'all, tho'. Broke all the rules. Grand metaphor for how to have humane ethics in a world that doesn't make any proper fucking sense. Tons of symbolism, and lots of layers.

This was one of my better ideas, and I remain head over heels in love with my characters, many of whom had been knocking around in my mind since I was about 12, but this was written the year before I got the chronic illness, and really, I was already getting sick but I didn't know it, so as a result my plot-work actually regressed. The plot was seriously disjointed, the ending was all fucked up, and the novel didn't work at all the way I had intended. Still think I might be able to save it on a massive rewrite, though -- E read it and called me "Anne Rice with balls", which made me laugh and respond, "I'd sure as hell like to get paid like I was Anne Rice with balls." This was intended to be the first of a series, maybe 5-7 books, not all told from this one particular character's pov, but all in the same world.


1999 - Taking From Strangers

Vampire novel part 2, continuation of same protagonist's becoming-vampire story. (Part 3 was planned to change pov to a different character who was much...older.) Only got a sketch and a few chapters in when the chronic illness hit, SLAM, no more novel writing for a while. No more anything for a while, actually. Just doctors and MRIs and spinal taps and surgical muscle biopsies and EMGs and the neverending terror that whatever it was, it was going to kill me before they figured it out. It was literally eating me alive, which was creepy as hell on more than one level, not the least of which because it was eerily reminiscent of my protag's becoming-vampire experience in book #1.

If I ever do get back to my vampires, this book is likely to be merged with Respect Among Thieves, which will be hacked up mercilessly for its own good. (Sorry RAT, you know I love you, baby.)


2001 - Another One of Shakespeare's Sisters

After a few years and some mild improvement/changes in symptoms, was starting to think I might actually live through the illness, but was still in major denial about the possibility of it being permanent, focused single-mindedly on getting diagnosed, getting better, finishing my college degrees and/or becoming a paid novelist. Trouble was, was still too sick to write or finish school.

Very suddenly felt very compelled to write a semi-autobiographical novel about my teenage life, my crazy mom, how I came out, how I became a writer, and some other things that happened back then, and this was it. The book wasn't really directly about my life or anyone in it, but it was closely based on real events and the characters were all composites of people I actually knew back then. Three months to the day after I finished this book, my mom died very suddenly and unexpectedly. Haven't been able to look at it since. Have no idea of its quality.


2002 - Everything Is True

Toward the middle of '02 (the bulk of which I'd spend in court with my mother's asshat cocaine dealer boyfriend), after I picked myself up off the floor -- and here's a friendly word of advice: if you can possibly avoid it, never, and I do mean never, read your own mother's autopsy -- I wrote another semi-autobiographical novel about growing up with a crazy mother. It was all very disjointed and out of sorts, and while I finished it, I know it would need serious edits before I could take it to market, but I haven't been able to look at any of it since I wrote it. Not emotionally ready yet.


I feel like I'm forgetting a couple, but that's okay. There are probably also about 6-8 half-novels floating around in boxes and in notebooks, and twice as many sketches and chunks and pieces, some of which could be good if I could finish them. I may yet. The illness doesn't let me work the way I want, and I get fogged out and it's hard to keep longer/complicated plots in line. They get too loose and lose themselves. I've not found a way to work around/through it yet. I get to about 10K-25K words and then things start...diffusing. I keep trying.

I've still been writing short stories, although not nearly as many as I'd like. I've written several about my vampires -- that's a sexy, dark, complex world and I love playing around in it. If I ever feel like I can go back to novel writing, I will likely return either to my vampires, or to this space opera thing I've written bits of and have had tumbling around in my head since I was ~17, in which a slightly Whedonesque female protagonist and her gang of weird little friends and sidekicks organize a series of rebellions against an oppressive heavily militarized intergalactic government.

So, in case anyone was interested, those are the kinds of things that go on inside the writer's portion of my mind. :)