Other Monsters Under the Bed

This is not, btw, my first, or only monster under the bed. I wrote other monstrosities before this one, even uglier. I never even considered trying to publish those. Even Young Me knew they weren’t publishable. Here’s an inventory of the ones I remember:

Fanfic Star Trek (original series) novel. About 70,000 words. I co-wrote this novel with my mother when I was in Jr. High; she wrote the Spock scenes, I wrote the Kirk scenes. I will always have fond memories of it. Long live fanfic!

SF adventure novel about aliens conquering the Earth. (Sooooooo original). I hand-wrote this masterpiece with an eraserless pencil while living in a remote Mexican village when I was fifteen. Word count? Hard to say. Pencil scrawl filled several wide-ruled spiral-bound Mead notebooks. I impressed myself at the time. Knowing what I do now about word count, I’d guess it was probably no more than 30,000 words. The mss is lost. History weeps.

Epic Fantasy. 400,000 words. (Yikes!) I wrote it in high school. Naif that I was, I mailed out this elephant-sized mss to wallow in the slush pools of all my favorite fantasy publishers. Yes, I first began to query in high school. I earned my first reject letters. One reject letter was actually personalized, a kindness I was too ignorant to recognize at the time. (Fortunately, although dejected by rejection, I was never rude.) I accepted the reject letters as one more hint I should go to college, which I did. Not only do I still have the original mss, mailed back to me, I have the original reject letters.

SF about an anti-Semitic theocratic dystopia. Word Count: 50,000-60,000 words. One year in college, God knows why, I decided to spend Finals Week writing this novel instead of studying. Another WTF-was-I-thinking moment. I almost flunked out, sure, but I finished that novel in less than a month. I assumed from the start I would never be able to publish it because of the edgy topic. “Edgy” is now really popular, but I still doubt this novel is politically correct enough to be published. I no longer know where the mss is, though I believe I have a hard copy somewhere. I hope. I would be sad if I lost this one, even if no one ever reads it but me.

Hmm. Looking at this list, mostly if not entirely complete, it strikes me I haven’t written much. I’ve re-written much more. Not on this list are later projects, for instance Dindi, which I have re-written a dozen or more times. I makes me wonder again where a writer’s time and creativity is better invested — in re-writing old works or in writing new ones? Some of these projects were flawed from the start. Re-writing would be wasted on them. Others, such as my Epic Fantasy, could have gold to sift from the dross.

Can the Monster Under the Bed Be Saved?

By “monster under the bed” I refer to a novel written many moons ago, with all the vim, verve and lack of finesse early novels can possess. I like the vim, love the verve, but could really lose the trite, overwrought and cliched prose my earlier self wrapped around the story.

Granted, I’m a sucker for the B-movie swashbucklers. That’s how I like ’em, so that’s how I write ’em. Give me pirates and kidnapped princesses, give me vamps and zombies, give me robots and planet-sized brains secretly running the galaxy, and I’m happy. Even a genre-hack must draw the line somewhere, however. B-movie quality is one thing; “SyFy Original” monster-movie-of-the-week is a whole new low. Even I won’t sink that far.

Exhibit A: Final showdown between villain and hero. The villain “looked down at his chest, muttered, ‘Oh damn!’ and died. He sounded quite annoyed.”

It was not meant to be humorous.

WTF was I thinking when I wrote that?! Oh yeah. I was seventeen. Not a mature seventeen like some of you teen geniuses out there (you make me sick, btw) but the kind of seventeen that thought the bad guy should say, “Oh damn!” and die. Sigh.

What do you think? Ever tried to revise an old novel?

I can’t stand letting it sit around in this state. I could die tomorrow (“Oh damn!”) and someone will find this mss, pity-publish it through Lulu (as it instructs in my will), and it will forever suck.

So here’s what I’ve decided. I’m going to hire a book-doctor to fix this mess. Since I have no money, I will hire the cheapest and closest book-doctor available: me.

You see, as it would be humiliating to admit I wrote this trash, I’m going to pretend it’s the mss of a stranger, who has hired me to fix it. A charity case. I will be cruel to be kind.

How about you? Have you ever dared look back at an early piece? Tried to edit/re-write/burn it? Was it worth it?