The Terrible Start
Freya Faust over on Bluesky asked: Hey #writingcommunity what's the first novel-length thing you wrote? And why was it terrible?
When I was a junior in high school in the late 1900s (heh), I started a novel. It was a science fiction story about telepathic aliens invading Earth in 2075. (hilariously the aliens fucked up the invasion plans by missing leap day in the calendar) Humans were helpless, until some scientists figured out how to give us our own telepathic abilities - mainly how to shield ourselves from the aliens if I remember correctly. We'd also discovered that prior to the invasion, the aliens had "done something" to the plant life on Earth, altering the DNA of a number of plants.
Why? Because lemons were toxic to them.
Of course the only solution here was to travel back in time to get unaltered lemons. And of COURSE in the process of this a US Air Force captain from the late 1900s ended up in the future. * finger guns *
Throw in a young Russian sniper with a grudge and a propensity to get herself into trouble. A hot-headed pilot doing something in the Utah desert (I don't remember what, I think she gets shot down and is on the run). An enormous cast of characters all over the globe with very little rhyme or reason and you can probably figure out why this book was terrible.
I loved it though. Part of me still loves it, even though after thirty some years I know it'll never see the light of day. It was, for me, the beginning of it all. I'd always wanted to tell stories but this book...oh, the title! Freedom's Last Stand. This book was the first novel I finished. Clocking in at a modest 112,000 words (I mean, for a first scifi novel that's not bad...but there were two more in the series :D ).
Obviously this one didn't get published, I'm not even sure I shopped it out, though an attempt was made in 2005 to revise the story, but by that point I had learned enough to recognize the problems with it and wasn't sure it could be fixed. I'd also shifted to fantasy and urban fantasy.
Twenty years and a baker's dozen of books later, I got an agent. Three years after that I sold Behind the Throne, the first book in the Indranan War trilogy to Orbit. The rest, as they say, is history.
What's the point of this somewhat rambling story? The book was terrible and I love it all the same. It's as much a part of my writing as the books that made it onto the shelves are, it's a part of my growth, part of my craft. Too often we focus on the wins and don't like to think about the failures, but those things we try and then set aside are equally important to a person's writing career. The authors who write and sell their first novels are few and far between (and likely even they will tell you that oh boy is the first novel a far cry from their newest work).
I actually opened the file for this story as I was writing this and it's fascinating to see the beginnings of my voice there on the page, even as I can immediately pick out the mistakes and the inexperience of teenage me. As I work on edits for my tenth published novel - And the Mighty Will Fall (ha, we have a pre-order page but not much else) - and see how far I've come, it fills me with an enormous sense of pride.
Things can be terrible and still hold value. Reminding you of how far you've come and all that you've learned along the way.
Love,
K