Reflection #13/40

As I mentioned earlier, my first novel was a surreal detective story called The Lobster-Quadrille.

I wrote my second novel shortly after we moved to Cincinnati, when I was unemployed and didn’t leave the house much. Working on it was therapeutic. The novel was . . . Did you hear the story about the teacher who wrote a novel and published it and then lost his job because the school district thought it was inappropriate? Yeah, I’m not going to tell you any more about my second novel.

My third novel was inspired by my college years. It had some nice parts, and was coming along pretty well, but it had structural problems. I got about three-quarters of the way through and set it aside to try the National Novel Writer’s Month challenge. My third novel is still incomplete.

In July of 2009 I participated in NaNoWriMo (which is technically in November, but whatever) and wrote a novel in a month. It ended up being a young adult fantasy novel called The Akseliad. The problem with writing a novel in a month, though, is that you have to do a lot of revision afterwards; I spent the next six years working on it. It also ended up being way longer than a YA fantasy novel can be, so it split it into two books. It’s now my fourth and fifth novels. Someday soon I’m going to try to find an agent and work on getting it published.  

My sixth novel is well underway, and is a complete departure from The Akseliad. Instead of young adult fantasy, it’s about grown-up reality. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, though I am told by the members of my writing group that it is extremely depressing.