What's your trunk novel about?

Does it count if it's only the beginning of a novel? I've got one which is an Ann McCaffrey Pern fan novel (probably nothing salvegable, although I'm still somewhat pleased by the bit about body paint, which is probably the only completely original thing in there.), and one which is an original science fiction involving a group of humans genetically engineering themselves to look like aliens, and pretending to be aliens when some regular humans show up to investigate. The other major feature of that attempt was Mercedes Lackey-esque lifebonding, a concept which I now think is rather cheesy. Definitely salvageable bits if I ever feel like writing a straight romance.

My very first novel is an incomplete one and I started it I think when I was about thirteen It was re-written later. Originally it was about a space-knight with metahuman powers who teams up with four other knights of various orders. I think one of them was a Jedi knight I called it "SHAF and the Tetra Knights" and it had a lot of Star Wars stuff tied into it and the SHAF bit was actually an acronym which stood for Space Hero Andro Forman.

The rewrite took out all the Star Wars stuff and was more of a history of the Forman family and actually combined some of my early short stories into one big novel. But even that never got beyond chapter 2 or chapter 3. It was called "The Sagitarian Saga" the second time around

Of course, now I have actually completed a novel after like 18 years. Nothing to do with that original story and I don't know if this can be called a trunk novel but it might end up in the trunk after all

I don't know that I'd call it a trunk novel, but it's something that I had started ages ago and have never really gotten a handle on. I have a couple interesting characters, a half-elf teenager and a wise-cracking unicorn, and a wizard who (now that I look at it) reminds me of Obi-Wan, in fact, he dies early on and the original intention was for him to be a "spirit guide." Anyway, the elf and unicorn were characters I started long, long ago (1980) and at the time they were probably original, but since I've waited so long, now they seem horribly derivative. Seems like a little bit of the TSR/Dungeons and Dragons thing, a little bit of Harry Potter.


One of my favorite lines is, the elf and unicorn are having a race and they race deep into the woods. Bartok the Blue, the magician who is now the elf's guardian shouts at them and they return.

"What did I tell you about those woods, boy?"

"You said they were enchanting."

"Enchanted! Enchanted! There's a difference."

Click to expand...

Sorry, I thought it was funny.

Oh, dear. My very, very first novel was started when I was 14 and took 5 years to write. It was a SF/fantasy futuristic coming of age story, very LOTR-ish (although I hadn't read that then). Mind you, we didn't have MS Word back then; I spent hours writing my novel by longhand and then typing it out on a typewriter. (This dates me terribly, but the "PC" in my house back then was an Apple IIC.)

Ironically enough, when I finished my novel during my freshman year of college I was so proud of myself that I added Creative Writing as a second major. And then, within one semester of taking creative writing classes, I realized that my beloved novel was extremely bad. It's not even close to salvageable. But I'm very fond of it--it did teach me a lot.

Katya

My very first book is not an novel at all. It's a relationship book. And some day I intend to retrieve my questioaire an notes and write it.

Or maybe I'll just use what I've learned from my primary research in a Roimance Novel instead.

My very first novel attempt happened at eight years of age. It was standard medieval fantasy. The castle servant girl was the MC, and she was fighting against the forces of evil. The kicker was going to be that she discovered, in the end, she had been fighting the forces of good all along. I think it's a good plot idea even now, although I only got ten pages into it. Ten pages is a lot for an eight year old. I may try do take the plot and reuse it in another setting later on.

I had a few more false starts after that. All decent stories that I still intend to do something with. After I finished explaining the idea behind one of them to my husband, he said, "Now, why aren't you writing THAT one?" HA! Maybe I will.

The farthest I got before I actually finished something was a two hundred page, hand written, retelling of Leroux's Phantom I started at thirteen. This was my big learning project. Though, I still think if I do some serious surgery on it and salvage all the original bits, I could do something cool with it. Oddly, I believe this to be the least salvageable of all my starts. Just goes to show that story ideas don't always get better as one ages.

In college, I completed a novel that I intend to do something with, one day, although it needs quite a bit of rewriting. The novel I'm working on now is the best chance I think I've got so far, although I'm sure I felt the same with all its predecessors.

Uh, was this supposed to be only ONE trunk novel. hehe. Oops.
I think I'm just scared to actually ship something off. All I have are trunk novels!

Hmm, I've sort of got three trunk novels. I wrote others before then, but didn't keep them. The first trunk novel has a draft horse as the MC; he was chosen to be a ceremonial mount for a ceremonial king, er, ceremony, but the "traveling king" chosen turned out to be a girl who bonded with the horse and they went on a long and episodic adventure where the bad guy turned out to be the good guy and the gods turned out to be aliens.... It was really atrocious. But I can't bring myself to throw it away, and parts of it are probably salvagable. Maybe.

The second is a YA fantasy that I think may be partially lost, but technically it's not a trunk novel because all it needs is a good rewrite and it'll be marketable. The three MCs are a girl who runs away from home to join a circus, an albino dragon, and a gargoyle brought to life by magic. Which, now that I think about it, is somewhat derivative right there--but not intentionally.

And the third is a fantasy that's been the rounds and did well (a couple of requests for full ms), but even after several rewrites it just doesn't quite make it. Eventually I will find time to rewrite it from the ground up, because it's the plot that's weak--the characters and world are entirely salvagable.

Mine was called Remember No Evil. It wasn't so much that the book was awful--it was that it carried a lot of baggage. I'd started writing when I was eight and wanted to write a book. Everyone told me that was too big a project (which was actually true), so I wrote short stories. When I finally decided to write RNE, I approached it like a long short story. I'd get to about 25K or so and the story would just stall. No matter what I did, I could not get past that point--even though I was certain I had enough story for a novel. At that time, I'd just gotten online, and when I posted questions about it being too short, I didn't get help--I got jokes from people wishing they had that problem. It was extremely frustrating. I worked on it for many, many years.

I finally ran across a book that said short story writers can have a hard time writing novels, and it gave me a list of everything I'd been through. Light bulb went off! So I got a book on plotting and went back to the beginning of the story. Unlike what I had done before, this time I truly started from the scratch to figure out how to put the story together. Then I met my co-writer, and I came to realize that if I really wanted to finish a novel, I had to set aside RNE. At the time, I could only commit to setting the story aside; when I finished Audacious Run, I tossed RNE. Later, I realized that I had worked on RNE so long that I had actually grown out of it--I was no longer the same person who started working on it. Another reason why I struggled so much with it.

My first attempt at writing a novel netted only about 35,000 words. I mean, I typed the end, so I finished it. Problem was, I didn't want to write a novella.

It's about baseball. I realize now (after writing another couple of manuscripts and a boatload of short fiction) that my problem wasn't the plot; it was the setting and characters. So I think I'm going to apply my basic plot to a high school baseball team instead of a pro baseball team. That, and I'm going to do some outlining before I begin. So is the manuscript salvageable? No, I don't think so. But the plot, the idea, the problem/conflicts/solutions/etc...yes, I believe so.

By the way, the enchanted woods thing made me chuckle.

I've got a few of those; all of them incomplete. My favourite Trunk Novel was called "All Howl's Eve".

It was based on this recurring nightmare that I had as a kid. It was about a kid who's subdivision was being attacked by all those cliche movie monsters (Dracula, Werewolf, Mummy, Zombies, ect...). He finds this abandoned house in the neighbourhood that has a room that leads to a cave that passes under a lava falls to an island where these monsters stay during the day. The kid had to steal all their weapons and hide them. But while hiding the weapons, the monsters get wise to the kid's plan and start chasing him. Never really got to the ending on if he got away or not. I'd like to think he did.

I have two trunk novels. One is set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic society which is somewhere between Star Wars and the Mad Max series. The MC, a woman named Archer, has finally been released from prison after serving seven years for a murder she didn't commit. In the time she's been incarcerated, there have been a lot of changes, and she ends up joining up with a group of rebels to fight against the evil overlords who are oppressing the people. I knew it was time to stop writing when I included a plucky band of orphans.

My second one is one I wrote when I was about seventeen and never finished. Also set in the future, it's about a trans-global car race, on a giant megahighway which encircles the globe. Most of the characters make me cringe, thinking about them now, although I do have one guy who seems to (much like Randall Flagg) pop up in all of my stories written since then. Anyhoo, one day I read the Bachman books and realized that Stephen King had written a way better version of my story in The Long Walk, and there was no way in hell I could ever do it that well. So I tucked it away, and lo, Next Exit still lurks in the bottom of a chest, unfinished and happy to be that way.

I have a couple unfinished trunk novels.

My first attempt at fiction happened when I was a junior in high school. I started outlining and writing a horror novel set at an old house in the country. The house belonged to the MC's brother. The MC had been asked to watch the house during his brother's absence. After he arrives he meets the old man down the road who knew the family who built the house decades ago. I've forgotten the rest, and the ms is gone. I wrote it all longhand. It was pretty lousy, but I think I knew it at the time.

In college I tried writing a young adult horror novel, whose MC's name was Mary. The story revolved around her jealousy of her best friend who was able to get all the things Mary wanted in life: a boyfriend, a ring, friends, etc. Mary had emotional problems that started when she accidentally killed her younger brother a few years before: she left the lid off the cistern top outside and her brother fell in and drowned. She put the lid back on and never told anyone.

The goal was to write a book like Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine, but have the horror come from within the character instead of from an outside evil spirit.

I can still probably salvage this novel if I ever figure out what Mary was going to ultimately do.

allen

Trunk novels?

I sold my first novel, and my first attempt.

It's about... Well, lots of things.

My first "novel" (incomplete, probably about 20,000 words) started off as a serial story about 8 years ago. I also used it later for my creative writing classes. It's called "Journey of Ten Thousand Miles" and was autobiographical, about a Chinese kid who came to America and found a new family, and his adventures with the new group of friends. Sort of Michael Chabon-ish as in his novel, "Mystery of Pittsburgh." Was it good? Hell no, but some people liked it (why, I don't know). Is it salvageable? I think the characters are interesting and the basic premise has potential, but it has be to completely rewritten. I never touched it again after my writing classes were over -- I guess I was a little discouraged after that. I didn't write anything until 2001 -- that's when I started writing The Pacific Between, which could very well have become a trunk novel...

Trunk

I don't have any trunk novels, but I did write a novel just a few years back that was so bad I tossed it. No regrets, and I'm glad it's gone.

My first attempt at a novel is the one I'm trying to sell now... hope it doesn't wind up in a trunk.

My first attempt at a novel (the Trunk Novella) was about a young man who gets transported to another world and falls in with political intrigue. It was much, much worse than it sounds. In my defense, it was an exercise -- an attempt to finish a long work -- and in that it was successful. Still, unreadable and unsalvagable.

The second was about college students, rural newspaper deliverymen, and wizards from another planet. It had some good stuff, but it was a mess. If I'd finished it more quickly I might have gotten it into submittable shape. But by the time I wrote THE END I'd gone to (and dropped out of) grad school, I'd broken up with my then-boyfriend and met the man who would become my husband, and I'd lost faith in the premise and my ability to pull it off.

In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have been publishable even if I'd revised it. There are good characters in the book, but the protagonist isn't one of them. And I didn't have the skill at that point to fix it.

Up until recently, I'd planned on rescuing a few of the best characters and giving them a story of their own. But revising the current WIP made me realize I can't go back to something I wrote fifteen years ago. So no, not salvagable either. Though occasionally I flirt with the idea of putting it up on Lulu under a pseudonym...

This may not come to a surprise for those of you who really know me: my first novel was a Christian Allegory about a creature that lived in a village in a valley, and his only hope to reach true happiness was to escape the forboding town and climb the mountains, and reach the top of the highest hill of the Lord. It was, of course, an arduous journey. After receiving my first rejection letter from Crossway books I literally cried about it, not having the thick skin necessary for rejections yet, and put the book away. Honestly, when I read it, I'm surprised at how sophmoric my writing at that time truly was. Note: I actually had four before that, but they were such junk that I never sent them. Hill of the Lord, at that time, was going to be my breakout novel - - or so I erroneously thought.

My first trunk novel I wrote when I was in junior high, about a kid who's parents were getting divorced. It was called "Things Could be Worse." But probably not worse than the dumb plot and trite dialogue I wrote.

In high school, I wrote "The Red Arrow". It was an otherworldly science-fantasy that had too much teen angst, navel gazing, purple prose, and horrible writing to be worth reading. Almost nothing worth salvaging there, either. It did have the line "The boys stood milling around," which still gets a laugh in my family.

My first novel is from junior high also. I think it's actually quite salvageable, except for three of the main characters being straight out of the D&D player's handbook. The rest of the cast still seems good today, which is odd since I despise everything else I wrote before college.

My favorite character was a crazy travelling merchant who thought he was a dragon. When the main characters meet him he's standing on the back of a pony flapping his arms and snorting like he's breathing fire.

The book lacked a strong villain. The whole time, the characters are questing to prevent the return of a dark lord who doesn't actually have any minions or monsters to send after them. The only fights they encounter are unrelated to theit quest.

Also, I find that I was really morbid as a kid. The main character gets attacked by a shapeshifter that looks like his best friend, and he kills it. Then, when his best friend finds him afterward, he thinks it's another shapeshifter, so he kills him, and then realizes it was actually his friend. I think only two or three of my characters make it through the book alive.

It'll be a few years before I try salvaging this one, though. I've got too many projects I want to get to that I think are better.

My first novel was a romance, and while I really like the story and characters, the writing leaves a lot to be desired. I class my first novel as work experience. At the time I was disappointed I couldn't get it published, but looking back now, I'm okay with it. It's now my future project. I will eventually go back over it and give it a shake up, but for the time being, its experience.

I can think of two stories that I consider trunk novels. The first was titled 'Highborn', a fantasy/sci-fi piece set on the planet Uranus. The biggest issue with this one was the fact my main character, Oberon, seemed too withdrawn to be the focus of the story. That, and I had no real idea of how to end it. I don't think I even have a hard copy of the writing itself. This idea exists on paper towels, in notebook scribbles and an eight page attempt at reviving it.

The second was called 'The Martian Project', a sci-fi action/adventure about a female assassin named Desdemona. I got considerably farther with it, but not far enough. I had a friend read what I had, and he told me that he had never read a story as feminist before. Funny thing was I had no idea it had that sort of message at the time. Oh well. It was fun, and I actually reshaped Desdemona's character for another idea, but that was all she wrote for 'The Martian Project'.

I've locked my first novel away in a dark, dark place. It has a few salvageable aspects, and I've kept those, but otherwise it stays there. It was a Space Opera about colonisation and a war for control of the colony -- and that's just about all of it I'm going to keep! I finished the first draft of it after about 6 years, and instantly realised that it was horrible. It was 75,000 words that alternated between dry exposition and all-out action, with little to no space between for characterisation. I did a rewrite that kept only about 10,000 of those words and expanded the whole thing to 115K, which I finished early last year, but still... I'm not going to try to publish that rewrite either. It's better, but not good enough. The MC is bland and stereotypical, and mostly just reacts. Most of the good guys are the same. There's one bad guy I like, but that's not enough. I don't think I can salvage it from this flaw.

I'm starting again, from scratch, pulling a minor character out of the rewrite and turning her into the main character of a novel that's set before the start of the one I've written. I'm going to write without regard to future history, so to speak, and see where this takes me. I expect at some point I'll start telling the same story again, maybe as a second or third novel in a series starting with the one I'm working on now. All I know right now is that I don't expect to reuse the same MC, and most of the plot points are unlikely to be repeated.