Or: Books I’ve written ala Hannah Moskowitz
A while ago, Hannah posted a list of books she had written but hadn’t sold in a question/answer post. Last night (Wednesday) when I was lying in bed watching the lightshow behind my eyelids and wondering why the heck I was awake at 5am when I had to get up 8, I decided it might be fun to do a post like that.
Hers had dates and summaries, but I’m bad at remembering dates and worse at summaries, so we’re just going to wing it here, okay? :P Most of these won’t have word counts because I didn’t have a laptop then and no WAY am I typing them up now.
(Late 2003, early 2004ish?) Unnamed novel/novella about an orphan boy who gets sent to a boarding school and meets a set of twins, a boy and a girl. There was also a weird subplot about a car accident and a younger brother in a coma or something. I think I killed him off eventually. I was eleven and this was the first thing I ever wrote that wasn’t for school. Strangely, it was contemporary and told in 3rd person past tense, from the orphan boy’s POV. I think his name was Will and the girl twin was Nessa. Can’t remember the boy twin’s name. That one shall forever remain trunked. It was forty or fifty longhand looseleaf pages of awful writing, so not really a novel, but I was eleven.
(2004ish, maybe late in the year?) A couple of false contemporary starts. I’d write a few pages and run out of steam. One of them, though, I wrote probably 20, 30 pages on. Characters were Evan and Amanda/Mandy. (Totally reused that name. Evan, I mean. Hey, it’s been seven years, it’s all fair game now.) All were 3rd person, past tense. Some had multiple POVs, some didn’t.
(2004, summer I believe.) Teh Vampire Novel That Would Not Die. It was briefly called Vampire City but, wow, bad title. Then I dropped that because I cut out the city so… anyways. This one was in 1st person. The tense changed all over the place, but writing first person felt right, so I ran with it.
The original draft of this I wrote in the summer between 7th grade and 8th grade. It took me about a month and it ended up being about 80 longhand looseleaf pages. In the beginning it was about a girl who moved into a house of vampires because her mom was the cook or housekeeper or something, then fell in love with the vampire son and they run away together. Yeah… great plot there, huh? Well, I was twelve.
I ended up writing about six different versions of this. In the numerous incarnations there was reincarnation, fairies, witches, babies, children, orphaned younger siblings, different species of vampires, ghosts, this is getting worse the more I type, it switched from YA to adult to YA to adult… and it spawned. It spawned two sequel/companion novels about characters from that world. Yeah. All 1st person, often different tenses.
There are a couple of versions of it that it might be fun to beg, borrow, and steal from, but all in all, this one is firmly trunked.
(2005 or 2006ish.) The Shapeshifter Novel. This one was about a teenaged shapeshifter named Camryn who discovers her best friend is also a shapeshifter. (Cats, not wolves or anything. Like leopards and things.) Told in 1st person. This one actually crossed over with Teh Vampire Novel.
This one spawned about… I dunno, it’d probably only be about 5k if I typed it, of scenes for a sequel/companion about another character. There was a character in the spawn that I actually ended up writing into one of Teh Vampire Spawn novels because I thought he fit better there. Apparently he was a player.
Moving on. Insert several more rewrites of Teh Vampire Novel That Wouldn’t Die, an attempted rewrite of that one of the contemporary ideas.
(2007, I think.) Okay, don’t laugh at this one. An untitled adult werewolf romance novel. Told in 3rd person past tense, it ended up being about 100 looseleaf pages longhand. I don’t even know. That was a hot mess.
(Fall 2008.) Hello, laptop! This is when I got my first laptop. I, of course, proceeded to try to write Teh Vampire Novel That Wouldn’t Die again because that’s how I roll. I wrote a 20k draft, I think, before it died. That was all I really did until:
(June or July 2009 to December 2009.) My YA werewolf book. It was 3rd person, past tense. Mostly because I’d been writing in 1st present for so long that my brain decided I was in a rut and needed to be challenged. It does that. I don’t appreciate it.
This one… I do still have a soft spot for this one. I still like the characters. I’d like to try and revise it someday, but not right now.
(January 2010) There was a 10k sequel I fooled around with.
(July 2010) Spyder, my YA paranormal romance/magic realism told in 1st person present tense, about a girl named Avery who has some very special powers and yeah, I suck at summaries. It’s better than I’m making it sound (I hope).
(August to Octoberish 2010) The Genie Book. YA paranormal romance novel about a girl who finds a genie in a bookstore. Fizzled at a bit under 30k. This is another I’d like to revise and rework someday, but at the time, I didn’t click enough with the MC.
(November 2010 – now, January 2011.) Berserk, my NaNoNovel that I’m currently rewriting. It’s a YA paranormal romance about berserkers, breakups and, erm, I ran out b-words besides the obvious. I… really like this one. That’s all I’m saying, though.
That took a long time. Hope you enjoyed it!
Peace and cookies,
Laina
