Draft Choices

Too many stories?

Photo by Charlie Solorzano on Unsplash

I want to get back into writing. I could start a new novel, but I have six drafts of novels waiting for me to finish, from 2012 to 2020, and I’d like to do more with some of them. That’s still a creative thing. Next steps? I’m considering, in order, which is my favourite story, also with good potential, a reasonable effort needed to finish it off, and that is likely to appeal to readers.

For each one, I had first written several Flash Fiction stories to explore an idea, the setting, and some characters. And as often happens, there seemed to be a longer story waiting in there. These were all written for NaNoWriMo—a challenge each November to write a draft of at least 50,000 words. Some were completed easily and have since undergone several edit passes, some got to 50,00 and stopped for ending, others fell short of the 50k mark. Can I ‘fix’ all of these? They do have potential. Plus, over the years, I have learned more about writing from a variety of sources, hopefully for the better.

---

How do I choose? It’s hard to decide, but I think each one deserves several hours, time devoted to re-read the text and review notes and comments I had collected from friends. I still have several free mornings for this in a week.

Here’s each draft, with some highlights, for your comments. Note - I’ll update these descriptions when/if I get comments back.

Six Stories

1 - Agnes of Grimm (2012)

• fantasy/crime

• 53k words

• 3rd edit

• Some Grimm fairy tale characters, including a witch, Red Riding Hood, a wolf, and a woodcutter, are brought back to life in the modern world and need to learn to live there as normal characters. One has a cop for a boyfriend, another runs a bar. They are trying to slow the fading of these powers, find a new purpose, and battle new evil forces from the Caribbean. They still have the magical ability to make a story more realistic, so they boost their powers a bit by doing little mini-scenes blending reality and fantasy. Local First Nations might be a new source of power.

• This is my ‘low hanging fruit’. Much editing has been done already, more is needed, but it might feel tedious to dive in again. But, I’ve gained more writing skills and I really do like the story and characters. I did a lot of Flash Fiction with them.

2 - Ghost in the Machine (2013)

• Sci-fi/crime

• 52k words

• 1st edit done

• Based on my Flash Fiction, The Ghost in the Machine.

• When a man’s wife/business partner dies, his immediate goal is to adjust to his loss. However, her consciousness is preserved in an online AI, a very advanced version of iPhone’s Siri she helped develop, so she’s neither dead nor alive. She discovers others trapped there and finds a new role in life, helping them and others in the real world, including a woman from a shelter. As these ‘people’ in cyberspace gain knowledge and power, they sense they can do a lot of good. Or not. Ethics questions, like who watches the watchers. In the meantime, a large corporation wants to steal this new technology and will go to any lengths to gain it, including wiping out her and everyone else in the system. Will the government want to take them over?

• Good feedback from friends, which is to be blended in.

• Lots of AI talk, some of it needing to be updated.

3 - The Portal (2014)

• Historical fantasy

• 53k words

• first draft

• Mary has a husband, a nice country home, and a new baby, but it’s not enough. She used to be really into sports, plus a wide array of interests and friends. She misses the full and edgy life she once had—she’s looking for some adventure. After her son crawls through an old door into her back yard, and disappears, she follows him into what is a Medieval Earth, but with magic. Magic that her son seems to be attuned to. Is he named Merlin? Does his yappy little dog look like a Dire Wolf there? She finds enemies to battle as well as friends and a new community. She likes this new edgy woodsy life of hunting and fighting, but she also has to find her son and then battle a sorcerer who abducts her husband and wants the secret of the portal.

• I liked the parallel worlds idea, and the historical links, but needs much more historical research.

4 - The Managed (2015)

• 51k words

• Sci/fi, revolution

• first draft, after very rough outline

• A retired revolutionary discovers a government plot to manage and control everyone via implanted ID chips. ID implants that initially just recorded ongoing health data now also track your position. The next version is supposed to read your emotions, but it also controls them, as well as vital functions like your heart. In this newly docile population, it’s even harder to be a revolutionary. Unhappiness ensues. What does a solar flare do to the government’s network of control?

• Good concept, even more possible here in 2026.

• Still need to put together a story for that, with character growth and conflicts.

5 - The Game (2017)

• 32k words

• Sci-fi

• partial draft

• Coming of age story - Hunger Games meets the Last Starfighter. Teenagers want to enter The Game, as it’s supposedly a way for everyone to be tested for their career in life, to discover a hidden purpose for it. Some discover that it’s also a way to select and train for an ongoing war (overseas?), that will soon escalate. Kids become little more than battle robots. Maybe the hero also has the ability to dream the future, and even change it. Is he the first of many?

• Good idea, but a lot of gaps, and maybe not really that original.

6 - Autumn Endings (2020)

• 844 words

• My Flash Fiction - The Sadness of Spring could be a prologue.

• Sci-fi, worldbuilding. More of an outline than a draft, it’s based on several FF stories I did on the concept. Would need a lot of creative work.

• Colonists escaping a polluted Earth crashland on the wrong planet. It’s habitable but a 100 year orbit and brutal long ‘winter’ means most of them die off. There are limited resources for survival, so they can’t just hunker down until ‘spring’. Or move en masse. The ship contains a sophisticated lab for artificial pregnancy, developed when toxins robbed the race of its ability to bear their own children back on Earth. The only solution now is to rely on this technology to birth and raise a new generation every ‘spring’. This also means a community-level assisted suicide for all before the long winter starts. Against all odds, one woman gets pregnant ‘mid-summer’ and gives birth to a daughter. She is loved and treasured by all, as the first child they have really raised. But, born at the wrong time and without any provisions for winter survival, it is assumed she will/must die with them all. Hard choice for all, including the young woman, of course. She rebels, heads out on a long journey to the south, brings a small ‘baby lab’, maybe some other older colonists. I could expand on her journey, could expand on what she discovers further south. Will she find other intelligent life? I could also examine the life that initially drove the colonists from Earth, the journey through space, and, after Steph resettles, the reaction to the next colony ship.

• I like this idea a lot for a novel. Or several? The astrophysics for a long orbital time and still a hot sun is a fun challenge, but doable. There is survival of the race, but then the issues of little continuity. And many challenges with a civilization where everyone is the same age, and agrees to mass suicide.

• This is the least complete draft of the six, but it has lots of room to explore.

• Need to decide where this saga (?) would start, and where it would end.

Your Vote

Thanks for reading this far. Comments are welcome on any or all stories. Which one is your favourite? Which is your least preferred?