Writing Novels

Over the years I've made various attempts at writing novels. When I recently retrieved my books from storage (remember I put much of my stuff in storage when I moved back in with my parents a couple years ago?) I discovered that I had placed my previous attempts at writing my own novels along with those boxes. Or, I at least had tidbits of each writing project. A couple of them were written on previous computers that I shared with my mom, I think, but I at least found outlines or notes on them with my books.

Ospella

I don't know how I came up with this name, though I suspect that it had something to do with my obsession with ospreys at the time. Ospella was majorly inspired by the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, complete with an abbey (or fortress?) named Ospella that was home to woodland creatures who had to fend off an unbelievable bad guy named Barblood. I may have been a little too inspired by Redwall, even having a hare who was obsessed with eating, and I called the youngsters dibbuns.

I don't think I had thought this one out very well since I don't know how it was supposed to end, aside from glorious victory for Ospella, and I only have about fifty handwritten pages of it.

Vanessa and Her Rats

A teenage girl finds baby wild rats who were orphaned, and decides to raise them by hand. Her friends help, and (completely unrealistically) they grow up to be great pets. (In reality, even hand raised they'll be too wild to be good pets if the parents were wild. But I didn't know this at the time.) Let's just say that I was extremely enthusiastic about my pet rats at the time. I was also really excited about Girl Scouts and decided to have the girls earn a Girl Scout badge during the book.

I think that I only have an outline for this one, and was writing it on a computer whose whereabouts I've lost track of. I figure it's around somewhere...

NaNoWriMo

Once upon a time a friend persuaded me to try writing a book for National Novel Writing Month. I have just a few notes on this one. It consists of two countries with new tension between them, a guy who's a bard/poet, and a lady mage who's also a warrior (and vegetarian...I was vegetarian at the time). They bring about peace somehow, and there's a dragon who helps at times. I also wanted a bit of romance, which I recall my family teasing me or giving me a hard time about, but I was trying to stretch myself. I don't think that writing romance would be easy for me.

I had no clue where I was going with this, it crashed and burned pretty quickly, and I'm not sure where the computer I was writing it on is. This was really my last proper attempt at a novel before this summer at a novel, and it was at least five years ago.

World building notes

I guess this doesn't quite count as a novel since I was just world building, but a novel was (is?) the ultimate goal. And I don't know, the NaNoWriMo thing may have been placed in it...? I have a notebook with twenty-five pages of notes about this world, and it's influenced some by Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea cycle. In particular the First Language and the dragons are similar to what you'll see in her Earthsea books.

My first entry in this notebook is dated 12/12/2004, the second to last is dated 9/29/2005, and the most recent is 9/3/2014.

Those Who Passed On

Summer classes may have fallen apart for me due to the anxiety problems (it was impossible to handle school for a while and I still don't know how to get completely back to normal), but my genre writing class got me started on writing what will be my first completed novel. Let's just say that it's urban fantasy influenced mildly by the horror genre. Oh, and there's a small but ancient dragon living with the heroine. Because I like dragons, and because everyone needs a dragon who perches on top of a cat tree and argues about whether you should have pizza or rare steak for dinner.