One of my new year’s resolutions for 2007 was to reconnect to my longstanding desire to write novels. Over the last ten years I have worked as a professional writer doing business writing and publicity for various organizations but somehow none of the personal, fictional projects I’ve started have ever amounted to anything. Over the past ten years I have carried these fits and starts around countless apartments and homes in six states. Somehow they have all been corralled into a folder, labeled “Personal Writing.”
In a fit of fall organizing I was going through my files this morning and I came across this folder. I have recently begun work on a mystery novel I am very excited about; excited, that is, until I saw the fate of my past projects. Today I realized it was not my skill or perseverance that was lacking in the past projects. It was that I had crappy ideas. We all have to start somewhere, though, and obviously I cannot do any worse than I already have. The contents of my cherished “Personal Writing” folder are as follows:
1. About one-third of an epistolary fantasy novel to be co written by a friend, this was to be a novel set in a medieval setting involving a corrupt priest. We worked on this while living in different parts of the country, and before the internet exploded, so I have each chapter in an envelope we used to mail them back and forth to one another.
2. The first chapter and lots of scribbly pages about a young photographer with major anger management issues, his girlfriend and her gay coworker with substance abuse problems. I envisioned this as a poetic novel, a combination of poetry and prose “seamlessly woven into one story.”
3. A book about an odd misfit named Mr. Petersen (I never intended to give him a first name) who works in a high rise office building downtown and drinks tea out of china cups at his desk. This was to be a scathing critique of modern corporate life. Since I have never worked for a large corporation and never had a cubicle I don’t know how I intended to accomplish this feat.
4. I have what seems like reams of notes for an epic poem to be on the subject of a butterfly flying across a field, up a mountain and back down to a lake for a drink of water. Working title: “Water Beside the Mountain.”
5. In 1991 I started a fantasy novel (and I should point out that I have read maybe a dozen fantasy novels in my life) about a precocious boy who is able to will anything into being that he focuses his thoughts on. In doing so, he has taken over the country’s political power and wealth abnd the novel was to be about a group of spoiled young people trying to overthrow him and reclaim their rightful rulership. If I knew anything about writing fantasy this could be an interesting idea, except I kept writing in my notes I wanted this to be comical. Also, I recall this whole idea was inspired by a Dan Fogelberg song.
6. I have 27 copies of the first chapter of a proposed novel about a college professor remembering when his friend was killed in college contrasted with this professor’s son as a freshman in college. I have the vast copies because I used this as a presentation piece in a creative writing class I took my senior year of undergraduate school because I procrastinated too long and had nothing else to turn in. I wish I could find them all and apologize for inflicting that on them.