What I Should Be Writing Instead of This Blog

I've already written a very long blog post about some creative writing projects I have completely abandoned for the good of the literate people of mankind. Today I'll share a little information about some stuff that I am currently working on — though by "currently" I mean that I haven't declared these works dead; they still have some sort of pulse.

AND DON'T FORGET THE RISK OF SALMONELLA

The ice cream = happy ending.

Here's an analogy, before I continue. Many writers are paranoid about discussing their in-progress material, and I'm no exception. It's like cookie dough. Cookie dough tastes good as raw dough, and cookies taste good when they've completed their little tour of a 350-degree oven. If you were to grab a cookie during the first trimester of its oven incubation, it would still be a cookie, but it would be too hot and too runny to be dough but too uncooked to be a full-fledged baked good.

In other words, it's fun to talk about ideas that you haven't fleshed out — "It takes place in an accordion factory...on Mars!" — and it's usually no problem to discuss a completed manuscript, but once you've actually started the baking and created a few words, even if it's the title page, it can be a burn-inducing mess to talk about.

(And yes, it can be hazardous to chat about your work even if all you have is that Martian accordion factory. I don't know how that fits in my analogy, other than to say you'd better not steal my idea for the blockbuster postmodern sci-fi musical mystery comedy thriller trilogy Professor Phobos and the Case of the Victoria Crater Squeezebox.)

So, here we go with a few examples of The Great Unfinished...

ANYTHING EMBARRASSING IS THE MADE-UP PART

He will likely not appear.

Project: A semi-autobiographical shaggy-dog Bildungsroman.

Progress thus far: About 180 pages.

How long I've been working on it: Years.

Last time I read any of it: Maybe six months ago.

Last time I worked on it: More than six months, less than a year.

I'm sure everyone's experienced a bit of Bildungsroman (that is, a coming-of-age tale) in their own lives. Combine that with the "write what you know" axiom that gets thrown at new writers, and you have this ugly mess that I've been working on in starts and stops for longer than my children have been alive. So far, it's really putting the dung in Bildungsroman.

THE GUNS DON'T SHOOT CREAM PIES

I owned one of these.
The joke got old fast.

Project: A comedic crime-story screenplay

Progress thus far: 30 pages.

How long I've been working on it: Two months.

Last time I read any of it: A couple of weeks ago.

Last time I worked on it: The day before I started this blog.

I was quite excited about my progress until I hit a bit of a wall by the end of first act. I want to finish this in time to submit it to a writing contest, so I'm using that deadline as motivation. During my late high-school years I thought about writing screenplays, and I have several books on the craft. Eventually I realized I was spending more time reading about writing that reading good works and doing the actual writing. I'd given up the whole screenplay thing years ago, but an idea hit me while I was enduring the boredom of Son of The Anthony Show's indoor soccer practice.

UNLIKE A LAWYER, A VAMPIRE SUCKS BLOOD ONLY AT NIGHT

"Do you even know
what a balm is?"

Project: A vampire-lawyer novel.

Progress thus far: About 100 pages.

How long I've been working on it: A few years.

Last time I read any of it: Maybe a year ago.

Last time I worked on it: Forever ago.

One day during my morning commute on the Long Island Rail Road, I was sitting in an uncomfortable seat, stewing about various injustices in my miserable writing life, when I decided to follow my cynicism to its logical conclusion: What are people reading about? mused I. All of could think of was lawyers and vampires. (And this was long before that Twilight stuff came out, and before you could find a "vampire literature" section at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble.)

I then said to myself, screw this, I'll write a book about vampires and lawyers and sell 15 million billion copies. So I started doing just that. But as much trouble as I had with the legal mumbo-jumbo, I ran into roadblocks with the vampire stuff. I never read the Anne Rice stuff that was available at the time, and I was asking myself too many questions that I was unable to answer, including:

• How old are my vampires?
• Are they evil?
• Does light kill them, or just make them too annoyed to bring in the garbage pails in the morning?

I had a problem with my tone, because I wasn't sure whether to make it a comedy or something a little more serious. I also threw in a character very much like myself, and I had trouble with him because I wasn't able to separate the character's motivations from my own. It sounds silly and schizophrenic, but there you have it. I had a black vampire character that was a somewhat broad Johnnie Cochran parody in the style of Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld, but you'd read a novel starring Jackie Chiles as a vampire, right? I know you would.

I had a little subplot about a synthetic blood product that I called NearBlood, which would go a long way toward improving vampire/non-vampire relations. It probably wasn't an original idea (I wouldn't have known, having never read a vampire novel), but one day I was on the corner of Bryant Park when a 42nd Street bus rolled by with this enormous ad for the upcoming show True Blood, and the ad was a fake ad for a synthetic blood product that appeared as if it would go a long way toward improving vampire/non-vampire relations. Seeing that was like a sharp clove of garlic impaling my left ventricle.

Besides that, the plot ran out of gas by the 100-page mark. I haven't abandoned it completely, but I'd probably have to rewrite the entire thing. Plus, I don't know if the proliferation of "vampire lit" would help or hurt the success of this thing.

Otherwise, I'll begin my series of Tom Clancy-style espionage thrillers featuring a a bespectacled boy who discovers that he's actually a wizard — and a double-agent!

"WHERE THE EMPERORS ROME" IS NOT THE TITLE

That's Emperor Trajan, bitches.

Project: A novel about ancient Rome.

Progress thus far: About 40-50 pages.

How long I've been working on it: A few years.

Last time I read any of it: I can't remember.

Last time I worked on it: Hmm. Not sure.

I have high hopes about this, sorta. It's a comedy and not intended to be historically accurate. (If you're looking for historically accurate and very entertaining novels about ancient Rome, check out Robert Harris.) I got very sidetracked when I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about that era other than Julius Caesar receiving very low approval ratings toward the end of his reign, so I started reading about the culture, the emperors, the Roman Republic, and so on. Eventually, I was more interested in learning about Ancient Rome (and am now pretty capable at talking discussing it: for instance, my favorite emperor is Trajan!), than writing about it. I expect to attempt to revisit this story sometime in the future.

WOW, THAT'S A LOT OF UNFINISHED STUFF YOU GOT THERE
Yes it is. One day I'll finish something, anything, and I'll be able to create a new category of my work to go with The Great Abandoned and The Great Unfinished: The Great Unsold.