First was the novella that got abandoned about horses based on the YA novel Ratha’s Creature. And I do mean based on. Like, an exact duplicate, but with talking horses instead of talking panthers. And ten pages long instead of 250.
Next was the supposed-to-be novel based on a sci-fi book someone lent me about cat people on another planet. Based exactly on the story. But I played the main character. I can’t remember that name of that one at all.
Then a book Aura and I started co-writing based on the question, “If you were on a desert island, who would you want with you, four people max.” She wrote one chapter, I wrote another, then her, then me, etc. It was improbable, silly, teenage wish fufillment (the answer was “each other” and “two band members from Led Zeppelin.” We LOVED Led Zeppelin. Or she did. I have a hard time with them now.), and took some very soap-operatic turns when things started to get dull. That just went on and on and on. It slowly drifted to a stop. Like our friendship eventually did.
Then another story about cat people based (more loosely this time) on characters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the comic book. NOT the cartoon. I enjoyed the cartoon, but the comic books were — well, bloodier and less funny. But still odd. I LOVED them. I still own all of them.
Then a story about an imaginary band called Hi Voltage, based loosely on the band AC/DC. I was improving. I was basing stories on people instead of on books I had read. That story also just kind of kept going, turning soap-operaesque when I wasn’t sure where to go next. The first story I ever finished was a novella that followed the daughter of the lead guitarist of Hi Voltage. The first characters ever created out of the ether for no purpose other than a story about them!! And it had an ending! Whoa!
Then I devolved and wrote a story about a girl adopted by a royal family seeking her real parents, based very tightly on the Mercedes Lackey Valdemer series. It would turn out that the girl belonged to a group of tribal people based on the Shin’a’in. I worshipped the Valdemar books for years. I also never finished writing my take on them.
Next was a story about the people the girl in the previous book belonged to. Again, based on Mercedes Lackey’s work, never finished.
Then I wrote another story based on the Shin’a’in, but this one was more about my take on the feminist movement and what it meant to individual women, even though it was based in a medieval fantasy world. It sucked. The characters were bland, the plot thrown in as an afterthought, the cultures nicked straight from M. Lackey. But I finished it. I even titled it. First Daughter. I still have a hard copy of it, and no one will ever lay eyes on it again.
Next I got interested in vampires, but I wanted my own take on them. I created a species sort of like vampires, but not undead blood-suckers, something stranger. I called them the One. Nothing significant about the name, I just couldn’t come up with anything better. The whole novel circled around a turf war between two of these creatures, with a human girl caught in the middle. Because I had decided that wish fulfillment was annoying by then, at the ripe old age of seventeen, I made the main male character gay so he would NOT have a passionate relationship involving many detailed sex scenes with the girl caught in the middle. Instead, they were friends, and since the One as a species were very territorial, there was no passionate romance with many detailed sex scenes in the whole book. I worried that it lacked something. I finished it, couldn’t think of a title, and abandoned it. I think the One might be sort of interesting as a species, but they need re-working. MAJOR reworking.
I still had a jones for vampires, especially since Interview with the Vampire had just been made into a major motion picture (Dating myself, yes), but I still wanted a unique take on them. I came up with the idea that the One could occasionally interbreed with humans, creating a creature that behaved more like a traditional vampire, while still being alive. I started the first chapter, then just tossed it out. I decided to go straight for vampires, because I loved them, because I wanted to read about them, and because my boyfriend at the time had written a short story for one of his English classes about a vampire that was just fucking cool. Also, I cannot deny, because I had started playing Vampire: the Masquerade with my friends and was deep into that shit. Deep.
I decided that I needed a story. A real plot, start to finish, interesting, surprising, and different enough from Vampire that I would not get sued, and NOT following the soap-opera life that our characters were leading. (Yay me! I had figured out that soap opera lives might be sort of fun to watch on TV, sort of fun to role-play, but NOT fun to read!) I started writing it, stopped, started again, stopped, started again, and finally finished a novella that was sort of interesting, not terribly well-written, and not tightly based on anything. I had become interested in vampires on my own, before Interview became a movie, before I started playing Masquerade, and had already written one novella and the start of a second on the subject out of my own head. I was nineteen.
This was the end of my horrible writing. While in the middle of editing this novella, I recieved a gift. A girl I worked with who was in the master’s program (emphasis on creative writing) at the local college gave me a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I had never considered there might be instructions on how to write well. That it might be taught at a college or thought about by serious writers. I read the thing in one sitting, then again. When I went back to my vampire novella, its horribleness stared at me like a scarred and disfigured child that I hadn’t realized I’d been abusing.
But.
The characters were solid. The basic plot wasn’t bad. Nothing else in the book worked, but those things did. I could see it.
I promptly went to the library, got out every book about writing well that I could find, and read them ALL. And started over on my book. All over. Page one. Chapter one. Donal startled awake to darkness.
I’m giving that book one more polish before I submit it as an ebook. I have to say, I’m pleased at how little editing it actually needs so far. I need to get rid of the semi-colons I adored at the time, I need to cut about 15% in scenes that don’t actually move the story forward. But it’s not bad. It’s not too bad at all.
