Most Authors have one.
It’s very rare for a writer to write their first book, and have it published, especially in the years where traditional publishing was the only game in town. In this day and age, where indie publishing is a viable option, I suppose more people might be publishing their beginner work. This is usually a mistake. Your first efforts at writing novels are almost without fail, terrible. I have some friends who are successful indie authors who have published their first novels, but in those cases those novels went through years of edits and rewrites, sometimes from the ground up.
So, what happens to those novels that are completed but never published? Do they go to live on a farm upstate? The term for this is trunk. It is the place our discarded novels go to rest in peace. Sometimes we have a vague notion of pulling it out someday and refurbishing the thing with our more advanced skills, but in general this doesn’t happen. The word trunk works as a noun and as a verb: That book is in the trunk. I trunked that novel.
Some writers have dozens of books in the trunk. Others have a handful, or even only one. For me, the first book I published was the fifth book I wrote from concept to completion, so I have four complete novels in the trunk. I thought it would be fun to talk about them and discuss why they ended up where they did.
The Whitecross Legacy (1991)
I wrote this book as a senior in college. I’d won awards for my writing, and my English teacher gave me a flyer about a contest for novelists 18 and under. The prize was publication. I had ideas, so I spent my study hall hours in the writing lab banging this thing out.
It was basically King Arthur: The Next Generation, but a ‘friend’ told me I couldn’t write that because it would be plagiarism (he was very wrong especially since these stories are definitely in the public domain). So, this was in the days before you could easily access that type of information about copyright, so I filed the serial numbers off and wrote a novel about the secret heir of a kingdom reclaiming his family’s crown and legacy. Also, because of who I was at the time I made it super fundamentalist Christian? Yeah …
Anyway, I finished the novel, which is actually pretty impressive for a teenager to finish writing a novel. That was the real accomplishment here, and I’m still proud of it. The novel itself … well, I had the skills of a bright student with good basic writing instincts, and the prose itself wasn’t terrible, but I had no idea how to plot, or create engaging characters, or worldbuild in a way that made sense, and … well, you get the idea. It was not great. It did not place in the contest.
But hey, I finished it. It was kind of ambitious for my first project. I thought this had been lost to history, but when I moved two years ago, I found it in a box in the bottom of my office closet. I read a paragraph and immediately noped out, but I didn’t trash it. It’s kind of literally in a trunk right now.
Vertigo Sunset/Blood and Water (I never really settled on a title) (2007)
This was not the next novel I attempted, but it was the next one I finished. I wrote it in the summer and on my prep during my teaching days. It was a YA thriller about a 16-year-old boy who finds out that he’s the avatar of a Lovecraftian monster that is returning soon. As a concept, it was solid. I liked the mythos. I kind of changed things halfway through and broke the spine of the thing, plot-wise, and wasn’t quite sure how to fix it, so I never edited it and submitted it anywhere. I don’t think I actually let anyone read it.
Interestingly, the main character’s name was Jack Bainbridge, which will be familiar to anyone who’s read my recent work. Just because you trunk a novel, it doesn’t mean you can’t strip it for parts.
The Calculus of Hope (v.1) (2011)
This was my attempt at an epic space opera and the worldbuilding and characters were dialed in pretty well. I’d developed actual skills by this point. I loved my core cast of characters and sent them on a breathless adventure through the galaxy. When it was done, though, I realized this thing had plot holes you could sail a galaxy class starship through. I had characters and worldbuilding down pretty well (for where I was) but I had not yet mastered plot. Once again, I wasn’t sure how to fix it without a total rewrite so into the trunk it went. However, this idea wouldn’t go away …
Prodigals (2020)
Ok, this was the book that kickstarted my writing habit when I decided I was going to do this for real in July of 2019. And write the book I did. It spanned a NaNoWriMo and about a year of consistent work, much of it done upstairs in the Redding Library. This wasn’t an entirely new project. It was the bones-up rewrite of The Calculus of Hope with more developed worldbuilding, a new main character, and an entirely new plot. I kind of thought of it as ‘Babylon 5 meets the Handmaid’s Tale.’ I finished it. It wasn’t terrible. It had a lot of potential, but when I got to the end, I had gotten the story out of my system, and I had no interest in writing any more of the books I’d planned in the series. While writing this, I’d gotten the idea that it would become my first published novel, All the Promised Stars, and I was eager to get to work on that. Prodigals felt like something I needed to finish but had no interest in actually publishing. So … into the trunk it went.
I am, however, stripping it for parts (yes, again) for my upcoming series Guardians of Forever, which I plan to start working on this summer. Now it’s kind of X-Men meets Babylon 5, and I am much more dialed in on the core themes. Some characters have transferred over, but it is mostly an entirely new cast and set of worldbuilding concerns. Far Future Superhero Space Opera, which is a very specific niche I hope there is an audience for. And I hope I have the skills to pull this off. It is definitely the biggest scale of a story I’ve ever worked on.
It’s important to note here that these are the four books I finished, but I had probably a dozen more I started and abandoned halfway through. It was before I realized I needed to plot ahead of time, and I was constantly writing myself over the edge of a cliff and then jumping to something new instead of sticking with the book and fixing it. But I was writing steadily in most of the in-between years (until 2016 hit and I entered a period of massive depression that didn’t abate until 3 years later when I had blown up my entire life but that is a different story).
So, for all the authors out there … how many books do you have in the trunk, and what were they about? And why did you ultimately trunk them?