Novel meme
Saw this at sora_blue's. Figured it's a good warm-up for plunging back into some editing tonight. I will also steal her line that it's mostly for my own interest...but, just so it IS interesting, I'm including my childhood attempts to write "real" novels. I will only mention the ones I got near the finish line on.

1. Mellissa (1992?)--I've mentioned this one before. It was about 20 pages handwritten, which I thought was pretty much novel length because it seemed like it took FOREVER, and I started to hand-write it formatted for submission to editors, but gave up. I wrote it for "the market". That is, it was about a girl and a horse even though I didn't like horses, but other girls did. Also I couldn't spell "Melissa".

2. (1994) I think this was called something like "Ones From Night's Darkest Shadow", or something pretentious, but it was a comedic (in theory) tale that ripped off of Xanth, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Final Fantasy games copiously.

3. Finding Faress (1995). Strange novel. Sort of an attempt at epic fantasy, but it was all over the damn place. We had racial tension between the cherubic cherads and their darker counterparts the derads, an undead guy, a healer woman, an annoyingly precocious child dumped on the undead man's doorstep, a missing world leader who was supposedly going to fix an entire world of ills...a lot of my classic themes, executed in a haphazard fashion.

4. The Characters novel (1996). I'm not sure it ever had a title. My first foray into writing about Det, Stan and Leslie. I had just met rusalkatrix, who was at that point the first person I'd ever met who had actually FINISHED a full-length novel, and she was very encouraging, so I actually managed to write an end to this. (Albeit an ending where the bad guy says "Time to take out the trash!") Of course, it pains me to even look at this now, but there were some good jokes in it.

5. The Life and Times of Det Arianni (1998). My most emo novel attempt. Young Det cuts himself, says stuff like "I like pain", drives a knife through his unfeeling hand just to show how bad-ass he is, draws broody art, and loses pretty much everyone close to him, plus an eye. The only thing that made it remotely tolerable was that it was from the perspective of the more sensible Veruvisa, his half-sister turned lover....except she wasn't originally his half-sister, only after she was reborn to save...um, yeah, nevermind. Just forget it.

6. On Borrowed Wings (1999-present). This idea had some real merit, as I am still trying to get it sorted out, now called "Wingless". It was just too ambitious for me at 17. I didn't have the plotting skills. But the characters were good and a couple of people who read what I had around 2001 really liked it, which was encouraging, because neither of these people were really my friends, so I suspected they were being honest.

7. Selkie Rock (2000). My first completed novel that went out on submission, about a small town of vampires, faeries, etc. undercover in America, particularly changeling faery Becky MacArthur. I still like this story but it was probably too quiet to sell, and no one told me NOT to start with a prologue of backstory.

8. My Dear Leslie (2005-present). Updated Det/Stan/Leslie novel. Still trying to puzzle this one out.

9. Magic Under Glass (late 2005-present). You all know this one!

10. Something That Sings (2007). You probably all know this one too.

Back to editing now.