I write a novel a year. None have ever been published.

Why? Because they’re my National Novel Writing Month novels. During the month of November, the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel (roughly 1667 words a day). At the end you get the satisfaction of knowing you wrote… a whole bunch of words.

I’m doing it again this month and I’m terribly behind on my word count. This has been a pattern for the last, oh, let’s say 7 years. So instead of writing tonight like I should, I thought I’d revisit all of my Nano novels and take a trip down memory lane to see which, if any, are actually salvagable.

Ready to jump into the dung pile with me? Good.

2011 – My first Nano. I wrote 3,000 words based on a dream I had. Water was killing people dead. The dream was better. I quit. Verdict: A tiny heap of dung.

2012 – My first successful Nano. It was about half-vampires (yawn) and I did horrible things to most of my characters. At the end of the novel, I realized that a 12-year-old girl got away with nothing bad happening to her so I made her eat a cat. This was the best-written scene in the book. Verdict: Still might keep the cat part.

2013 – I came up with an idea of a B-movie actress aging out of the business and saving a small town in Louisiana from an ancient evil. This was probably my best work to date although I don’t write in a straight line so there are scenes everywhere. Verdict: We can rebuild it.

2014 – This one involved a writer’s characters coming to life or…something. I got to 50,000 by rewriting the opening scene hundreds of times. There are also several paragraphs devoted to my hair. Verdict: It’s dead, Jim.

2015 – Swamps! Louisiana! Sirens! No, not the blaring kind, the kind that lure young men to a watery death. This one was a lot of fun although I can’t figure out why I had two Nano novels set in Louisana. I actually have to visit there someday. Verdict: Could use some seasoning. C’est tout.

2016 – I didn’t learn from my first half-vampire mishap so I wrote them again. Half vampires form an AA group to stop drinking blood. The idea was good but the main character was so dull I might as well have named him Blandie McBlandovich. Verdict: Put a stake in it. It’s done.

2017 – Two goody two-shoes find each other and then decide not to be good anymore. I lost the plot but it was still fun when someone at a write-in was crying over killing a character in their novel while I had one of mine brutally hack up another. Verdict: Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?

2018 – Ghosts get together to solve a mystery. I didn’t finish. This is the first Nano since 2012 I didn’t win. I hated everything about it and if it was possible to kill ghosts, I would have found a way. Verdict: Sometimes, dead is betta’.

2019 – Movie monsters are invading a book store. That’s all you need to know. This is my first Nano novel written in the first person unless you count that unfortunate incident where I wrote two chapters in the third person because consistency IS FOR THE WEAK. Verdict: It’s on life support but still could pull through. We’re monitoring the situation carefully.

So that’s my Nano adventure and while most of these are headed for the dung pile, there are a couple that might serve as fertilizer from which flowers bloom. Just no more half-vampires. But then again… 🤔