Everyone has a Novel in them. What genre is yours?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Surely most poeple have heard it said here and there that “Everyone has a Novel in them waiting to be written”.

I believe there’s at least one inside me, and I suspect it is most-probably a science fiction novel based on a highly evolved society which has colonised space mostly with vast space stations (with an average population capacity of about a million people) and has also colonised the moon and mars with self-contained structures.

What genre of Novel is inside you? And if you have spent enough time thinking about it, can you be more specific than the genre?

2

It’s a Dean Koontz-style thriller. I have to emulate Dean Koontz because I’m not a good enough writer to emulate Stephen King.

3

It’s a romance, involving 2 souls who keep coming together, time after time (via reincarnation), beginning in the mid 19th century. I started it about 20 years ago, after visiting San Francisco, and getting weird deja-vu-ish sensations seeing all the beautiful Victorian homes. My mom and I worked on the timeline, and the family trees, and she helped me find historical data to make the plots more believable. If I ever find my notes (long since buried in one of the boxes I never unpacked from two moves ago) I may work on it again.

Don’t nobody go stealing my idea, now! :frowning: :slight_smile:

4

Fantasy. Maybe not a strict sword and sorcery tale, but fantasy of some sort.

5

Either fantasy…

or coming-of-age…

or a combination of the above.

6

Fantasy with humour, generous amounts of weird, lots of romance, loads of thrills, and a poem about cheese.

I await my glowing reviews in the New York Times…

7

Does it count if you’ve already started to write the novel? Mine is sort of historical fantasy / coming-of-age.

8

Spy novel/romance.
In the end, the plucky heroine turns the male romantic interest in to the FBI.

9

Mine would be a historical romance set in the late 1700’s early 1800’s

10

A historical high-seas travel adventure, circa 1700, written in the style of a period journal. Of course, that would make it so horribly racist, sexist, and everything-else-ist by modern standards that it could never be written.

11

Murder mystery. Very Alex Cross. I’ve started it a handful of times…man, that’s some bad writing.

12

I have three manuscripts finished and two more in development.

Finished: “The Snake Patch,” a coming-of-age story about four 11- and 12-year-old boys in a very small town in the rural midwest; in their communal treehouse in a vacant lot called the “snake patch” one night, they watch in horror as a local high school girl is raped in the vacant lot. When the girl is later found hanged from the treehouse, the boys become witnesses to the prelude to possible murder; the investigating policeman is the father of one of the boys. During the summer, they struggle to reconcile what they think they know about sex and life while a legal battle swirls around them. A string of rash decisions brings the drama to a tragic end, and the main character is left with serious questions about honor, heroism and truth.

“Apostate”: A newspaperman saddled with his family’s failing ranch struggles to keep his career and the ranch in balance. When the family gathers to bury his grandfather, the patriarch, he must announce that he has decided the ranch must be sold. In a private conversation he learns that one of his brothers, an Episcopal priest, has lost his faith and plans to leave the priesthood and divorce his frigid wife. Disagreement over the ranch erupts into physical violence, which leads to the discovery that the priest is a drug and alcohol addict. An attempt to keep him sober and straight leads to long discussions about faith and apostacy; sobriety fails and he dies after trying to “fly” from the barn’s hayloft. While still mourning his lost brother, the newspaperman becomes embroiled in an ethics controversy at work and feels himself losing faith in journalism. In an apocalyptic scene, he publicly denounces his publisher and managing editor. He is fired and turns his back on journalism as unworthy of his time and effort; he searches for something he can believe in.

Also finished: “Fatal Deadline,” a potboiler about a band of mercenaries in the 1980s – head merc falls in love with a big-city TV newswoman, she begins to find out what he really does, they’re both endangered by a new menace neither of them saw coming.

In development: “Schism” is a sprawling blockbuster about a chain of national and international events that leads to the 17 western states seceding from the union on the eve of the 21st century and, the brief but disastrous war that follows as the U.S. tries but fails to keep the nation together. A sequel (untitled) is planned in which the founders of the new western nation struggle to create a new government that “corrects” all of the things in the old government that made them rebel in the first place. Texas and California agitate to break away to form independent republics; white supremacists try to create their own “white homeland,” and in the U.S., rebel commanders captured during the war are tried, convicted and executed for treason.

Anybody know how to get a book published? I’ve been trying for 15 years, with nary a nibble.

13

SF Noir Thriller Comedy Adventure Romance. It’s complicated.

But seriously, folks. I’d write Fantasy, either classic mediaeval, or steampunk.

14

To shamelessly paraphrase (where is that quote?) Ignatius J. Reilly-and with all apologies to the ghost of Toole.

“An indictment of our times.”

15

If I actually WROTE a novel, it would probably be fantasy.

My life rather more resembles a humor travellogue type book, though.

16

Several, I’m just very lazy about making 'em happen…
• A science-fictiony thingie about some Other-Future Culture and what they gotta deal with. Gradually it becomes apparent that OFC is in a world where anarchy has become the way of things, at least as far as formal power over other people is concerned. But big social issues are rife: has this so-called “anarchy” become an intelligence-ocracy, or, more specifically, the power-playground of those who are most adept at explaining their plans & visions to others? And if so, is that fair, or does it disenfranchise those who lack the explanatory/people-convincing skills? Some people are shouting “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”…

• A juvenile-audience kind of tale about a teenager who kind of distantly recalls something that either was or was not a vivid dream from when she was about 10, concerning the ridiculously huge and very cluttered walk-in closet that way up high in a back corner (she recalls) had a shelf that (if you pushed enough stuff out of the way) went pretty far back and then another shelf level was above it, and if you kept on going you ended up in the back of a closet on a different hidden floor. You could look out the window and see the front yard, etc. But there were rooms on this floor that were all cobwebbed or covered in dust, a forgotten floor, some place no one had been to in, like, forever. So now, years later, she’s gradually & increasingly obsessed with the memory of going there and finally decides to explore and see if it’s really there…

• Yes of course: a seriously spooky horror tale set in a condemned psychiatric hospital building. Ghost-critters. Reason to fear the spectres of creepy crazy folks, but also fear of the ghosts of the folks running the place, and central of course the sense that one is losing one’s own mind, that the place is drawing you in and making an inmate of you. Lots of perception-games and fun with how to manage the state of being unable to rely on one’s mind. As predicted by anyone here who knows me, some spooky stuff drawn from actual psychiatric-hospital practice, and lots of trust and betrayal-of-trust issues. But not a polemic, more of an excursion into the underlying philosophical questions about mind and sanity and reality and the extent to which we depend on external confirmation from other people that our brain is doing valid things, and the extent to which we need other people.

• Also pretty predictable: Some kind of fairly generic story (e.g., standard mystery or spy or action thingie) with a main character who is a male gender dysphoriac (doesn’t like being male), oriented towards women, crosses everyone’s wires (gay, straight, medical, psychological, transgendered, etc) due to not fitting into anyone’s existing slots. All of that stuff stuck in the background and incidental to the plot, which is standard fare.

17

Written it already, as you well know. :stuck_out_tongue:

18

I’ve got several in me. As much as I wish I had an SF novel there, I’ve yet to rattle it loose.

Instead I’ve got plots for a cycle of fantasy novels, involving paladins, imperial succession politics, the undead, wreckers, and religion. Unfortunately the book in that series that’s going to be the hardest to write (one of the major characters must be a sympathetic villian) is the one that comes first chronologically.

I’ve also been noodling with a couple of contemporary romance novels. Based, for the most part, on taking common romance novel conventions and turning them upside down - because it amuses me to try to write a parody that will work as a romance in its own right.

19

Science Fiction:

Far in the future, silicon-based/electronic sentience has prevailed over organic/biological sentience as the dominant intelligent force. Humans don’t even exist any more, it’s all machines. Standard stuff so far.

The kicker is that the silicon intelligence find their highest meaning in art, their highest version of which is the emulation of the romantic/analog aesthetics of the early biological life forms as seen in now-extinct humans. This emulation is taken to such an extent that electronic society’s highest members physically exist in human form: genetically reverse-engineered humans with the member’s mind downloaded/designed into the organic brain.

These new “humans” find such value and meaning in their new existence that they strive to eliminate the lower levels of electronic existence in their society while perpetuating the higher order they’ve created through good ol’ biological reproduction. This effort is realized through a civil war of sorts and they succeed such that all electronic sentience is eliminated and only the new human form remains.

The war is costly, with the complete destruction of electronic society and the new humans are reduced to hunter/gatherer or maybe basic agrarian living. Regardless, almost all knowledge of the past is lost in a dark age and eventually the new humans become unaware of their past entirely and everything starts all over again.

And I’d fill the whole thing up with classical/romantic, feelings/logic, art/science, digital/analog, scientific/religious symbolic duality, blah, blah blah…

I hammered that out pretty quickly, hope it makes some sense…

Hell, this story has probably already been done…

20

I have started more than one Fantasy. And a fantasy/mystery cross over.