Not every book works, at least not for me.
I currently have four fully realized “orphan” novels I’m sitting on—
Taiga, A Sharper Dark, Star Hill, and Thirteen Days.
Taiga is a crime novel set against the backdrop of rural West Virginia, and an exotic animal farm located there. It’s actually based on a very singular picture I saw—
Most books don’t come to me fully formed, but Taiga mostly did. I saw the above picture and it stuck with me for days, until one day I was literally stuck (in traffic; I was living in Northern Virginia at the time), and hashed out the plot sitting in a bumper-to-bumper gridlock on I-95 South.
A Sharper Dark is a speculative/paranormal suspense novel revolving around a once famous medium/psychic now reduced to making his living as a late-night radio host. This is the book I was agented on, and although it was never bought as a novel, it was optioned for a TV series, that I then got and offer write the pilot for.
Star Hill is (another) WV set crime story, focusing on the disappearance of a teenage girl, and the teenage boy suspected of it. Like Taiga, it’s loosely based on a real news event, the horrible and well-publicized 2012 killing of Skylar Reese.
Lastly, there’s Thirteen Days, a book I’ve mentioned several times. Set in Texas oil country (the Permian Basin), it’s dark, difficult crime novel; my remixed, remade homage to the 1988 movie, Tequila Sunrise.
So, that’s the four in the drawer, and three decent-sized chunks of others gathering dust: Burn Down (currently recast as a feature film script), an untitled sequel to Lost River, and an untitled fantasy…thing…
There’s a variety of reasons why these novels didn’t find homes, or I didn’t push to find “proper” homes for them. Taiga is too raw, unfocused, undisciplined. A Sharper Dark hits closer to the mark, “shinier,” but still immature, in many ways. Star Hill straddles a really difficult YA/Adult divide, while Thirteen Days is just one of “those” books— deemed “too dark” at the time I wrote it, when I moved into my more “speculative” phase, it was truly orphaned. although I recently did revisit it, and think there’s a chance I can get someone to take a look at it.
Still, I don’t consider any of these books failures. A completed book is a success. And like most writers who have a drawer full of unsold or unpublished manuscripts, I learned something writing each one. I still love each book. They were stories in my head I desperately wanted to get out, and even if they didn’t fully work on the page, or I wasn’t a good enough writer then to do them justice, I’m glad I spent the time.
I have seen here on Substack where some folks have been serializing their novels, and I’ve at least noodled around with the idea of revisiting one of these (like I did with Thirteen Days), and perhaps including chapters here on Far Six. Is there value in that? I honestly don’t know, but without a doubt, like old friends, it’s fun to sit down again with these books, see how they’ve aged, and see if they still hold up, or can.
As always, feel free to—
Great stuff, Todd! Thanks for sharing your writing journey! It was also very cool hanging out with you at Bouchercon this year!