As I was reflecting on my past experiences with NaNoWriMo (trying to write fifty thousand words in the month of November), it got me thinking about projects I’ve either finished and refuse to publish, or novels that never got finished. And I’m here today to tell you about the best ones.
I think I have to give an honorary mention to “Why?”, which was actually published online through a company that no one has heard of and is impossible to purchase now. That novel is a raging dumpster fire, and I say that with utmost love and respect for myself. I was very young when I wrote it, and had no outline to go off of, so things severely went off the rails.
The next novel I seriously started writing was “The Love of Chandre” (Chandre is a couple name for characters named Charlotte and Alejandre). It was romance, not surprisingly, and followed a couple through five plus years as they fell in love, navigated high school, and generally just lived. I will tell you right now that that novel is full of way too many mundane things that aren’t really that relevant. There was an outline, well, kind of, but it got boring while I was writing it, and I walked away from it. I’ve tried coming back to it over the years, and I want to, it’s just there’s a lot of editing I need to do, and right now, there’s other projects that I’m focusing on.
Now, in thinking about this, I’ve started wondering how many finished novels the average author has sitting on their computer, and then it reminded me that I have a fully finished (but not fully edited) fantasy novel, just vibing in my Google Drive. It’s not good, and again, I want to return to it and make it into something I could actually release, but my brain is too preoccupied at the moment. I will say, I love the premise: a team of spies gets transported to a magical dimension, and with a group of spellcasters, they have to collect gems from each kingdom in the realm and defeat a bunch of evil creatures. Writing that out makes me want to go back to “The Frosted Isle”, and I might have to add that to my 2024 roster…
After writing an entire fantasy novel, I decided that I needed to return to my roots and write another romance novel. And thus, “Writing To You” was born. Not going to lie, I love the idea behind this (best friends falling in love, she’s a writer, they start doing long distance, and she ends up writing a book of their love story), but I think I’ve used pieces of this novel in other ones, and there’s a lot of editing I would have to do to make the twenty plus chapters usable. Not impossible, but right now, I’d rather just start new.
The most recent project I’ve finished and left to the graveyard of past projects was “An Author’s Romance”. It was my NaNoWriMo project in 2021, and though it’s better than the project listed above, I will never release it in the state that it’s in. I tried combining it with my other best friends to lovers she’s-a-writer novel “Writing To You”, but it wasn’t working, and I’ve decided to let both of them rest. This was the first novel I really started exploring some darker themes, so I appreciate that part of it, however, you will probably never see this project.
A lot of why most of these aren’t released is because I don’t want to seriously edit them, but they can’t be released in their current state. I love the ideas, but I don’t love the idea of spending a year trying to rework it into something semi-usable. But, who knows? Maybe someday I’ll publish these novels, and I’ll have a great story behind it.
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