Ghosts of NaNoWriMo Past

As you’re reading this, I’m approaching the halfway point of National Novel Writing Month. Every November, myself and thousands of other people endeavor to write 50,000 words of a novel. As an event, I’ve participated for over a decade to a wide range of results. I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at some of those previous works and see what happened to them in the years since I first started them.

First, if you want to see this list yourself or just follow along with my current progress, you can head over to my participant page at the NaNo site. You can find a comprehensive list of my works over there, as well as links to the ones currently available to purchase!

My very first attempt at NaNo dates back to 2009, before I even had my first laptop! “Fire Knight” was the working title for a science fiction novel based on everything I loved in the genre as a child: weird warriors, space marines and deadly aliens. It was also my first failure, as I barely made it a 5th of the way before I realized it wasn’t working for me at all.

The next year I would reach goal on a project called “Neo-Tokyo Twin.” Inspired by a childhood of anime viewing, I wanted to craft a corner of the MHP Universe as a cross between cyberpunk aesthetic and mystic hero tradition. I accomplished the 50k word goal, but found the novel off-track for the last chunk. Ultimately, it went into a drawer to wait for a time when I wanted to revisit and relaunch it. If you’re interested in a peak at the tale, a selection of it was featured in an old anthology I Was a Teenage Metahuman.

After that, I worked for the first time on KITH, as I wrote the initial adventure of Cinder, Enigma, Jigsaw and Kodiak. The four brothers proved to be one of the easiest NaNo projects for me to produce, but starts and stops over the years as well as a need for some heavy edits in a few places slowed their release drastically. They recently resurfaced as a Kickstarter project however, now with a planned release date early in 2022.

In 2012, I worked on Airboy. My first tale, as seen in the pages of Pulpsploitation, revives the character in the early 1980s as he faces down a dangerous new threat named Bombshell. I worked on a novel length follow-up at the time, but the book quickly fell off the rails. Like “Neo-Tokyo Twin”, the remnants of that story wait for a revisit and a relaunch.

My 2013 project was The Hidden War, a superhero saga set around the events of the War of 1812. Meant to be a key link to the past of the entire MHP Universe, problems with the conclusion have delayed the novel for years. However, the final chapters of the book are currently on my schedule to work on going into the New Year with a hopeful release in the third quarter of 2022.

The next year I hoped to revive a character I’d worked towards on and off for years, Vengeance. Unfortunately, health and family issues derailed most of my life that year. 2014 would bring my second tap-out to a NaNoWriMo project.

I planned to try to make my way back to Vengeance the next year, but my mind was on another hero. Lightweight ultimately took over all my plans for the year, but while I did hit the 50,000 word goal it was not on a full novel. I would finish the project over the next few weeks and those words would ultimately make up most of Lightweight: Beyond, my third and currently latest Lightweight novel.

Not to be outdone, I returned to Lightweight in 2016. Over the course of the year, I wrote the chapters that next year will finally be collected as Lightweight Volume IV sometime in 2022. The new series of adventures brings Lightweight back to Earth, but he isn’t anywhere near home. The new series takes him across Europe and into a battles that take him in new directions. The new edition will involve some heavy edits from the original project, all of which are also in the pipeline for December.

Another unfinished project took center stage the next year in the form of Graymalkin. A character whose origins date back to my childhood, the book will tell the tale of a hero raised in an ancient religious order to be an ultimate weapon. He broke free from them years ago, but that hasn’t stopped any of the machinations behind the scenes. Set in my own city and with a cast of supernatural heroes and villains, the book builds on history and esoterica to form a full narrative. The novel remains mostly finished, but the need for heavy re-edits put it on the backburner as I worked on other books. If all goes as planned, I hope to return to the novel and finish it next year with a hopeful release date in early 2023.

In 2018, I worked on a book I titled The First: Hero’s Dawn that would be my take on some early forties superheroes. Though I scored a win that year, the narrative simply didn’t work for me as it remained. Two of the three heroes in the book felt terribly flat to me, while the third deserved her own narrative. Someday, I might go back to what I wrote there and reconstruct a full tale for that single character, but for the time being I still chalk up this NaNo as the first featuring a story I didn’t feel the need to bring to print.

Two years ago, I went back to Lightweight as I worked on the first half of what will ultimately be the fifth volume of the series, which will publish sometime in 2023. Covering anything about the events of this one will spoil the upcoming fourth volume though, so my lips are sealed on it for now!

Last year, I ran into the second project I realized wasn’t going to work as I put it down. "Century” was meant to be an ambitious project starring a new family of heroes as they made their way through the 20th Century. Also named Century, the family narrative and the connective tissue around it ultimately proved far less compelling than I expected. Instead, the individual narratives that were meant to make up the story over ten decades will likely find use in other ways, probably with new and different characters. At least one story will be reworked for use in the next volume of my Collected Stories.

Finally, we come down to this year. As you read this, I am deep into the first book in a planned new series. Dubbed “Legacy of the Devil,” the new series focuses on a young man as he takes his first steps into a superhero inheritance he hoped he would never receive. The first volume will bring him into conflict with an enemy from his family’s past even as he must master the rush of new abilities he’s received!

Like previous NaNo projects, I cannot yet say when this new story will see the light of day, or even if it will. But I plan to make the most of this November as I go full tilt into my newest creation!

Let me know which one of these projects sounds the most exciting to you!