Thread by @duganist

Now here's a thread about the novels I started but did not finish in college ranked from least favorite to most.

Nobodies Understand You was my Fight Club take. It was about an office worker in New York who sees a staged fight between homeless people and gets radicalized, ends up joining a group of faux superhero vigilantes and it goes badly.

Cover photo: homeless guy on shopping cart.

Inclusive Biography of Jesus Christ was my 1st novel idea after I finished Better Than Church in high school, worked on Freshman year, delusional homeschooled guy thinks he went back in time with a "chrono trigger" to mentor Jesus from ages 13 to 30, starts a cult, gets executed.

An American Vampire In America was my post-modern novel that I abandoned the best of these to work on late sophomore year, finally gave up early jr. year when Marty Beckerman gave me middling feedback on drafts. It was very dark. I researched energy vampires and f'd up my Chi.

In addition to being a bad move for my literary career, really best case scenario you have an interesting po-mo novel that 2000 people read and a blog fan base of total weirdos and you maybe do a little tour of college towns meeting weirdos, best case!

Post-modern is weak -

In addition to that I think my obsession with energy vampirism researching and channeling shadow energy to write sections, it hurt my health. I had a prolonged health crisis of chronic symptoms. Shouldn't have fed on the chi of trees. I'm telling you.

The cover image was from a Newsweek article that graph mapped out the sexual relationship history of people in a school and there is a big super-graph with a hole in the middle, kinda looks like a dragon,

So header like:

An American
Vampire

[in]

<in graph hole>

(America)

Pat Rhodes who works in REITs now asked me what novel I was working on over the summer and I said: "An American Vampire IN AMERICA" and he laughed.

My favorite novel prototype from then was Swords to Satanists, and it's a dang shame I didn't have the discipline to finish it. This would have been some fun Harry Potter meets Naruto vibes with MCR soundtrack, Thank You For the Venom, Finn MacCool vs. shotgun Paladins - yes yes?

It had a sort of two dimensional love story, a buddy cop relationship with the Paladin-turned vampire who teams up with Finn, a redemption arc, epic magic battles, Naruto level tactics and strategy in the fights, a lot of fun. It had *structure*, it had pacing, build up, climax.

Seriously my life would have gone very differently if I had followed through from world building to completion. I would have been a minor lit. celeb and young, playing that Finn Mac energy, I would have made the videogame franchise with outside funding.

Moral of the story: make a good product, post-modernism is super lame, don't feed off people's chi or anything weird like that, you want blue magick.