WIPs

Some books never quite live. so they never quite die...

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 And like most writers who have a drawer full of unsold or unpublished manuscripts, I learned something writing each one.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—