Inlanders by Stephen Reese

Some writers with links in my blogroll at right have been posting about the number of novels they wrote (to varying degrees of completion) before the one that got published came outta them.

Now.

I haven’t published a novel yet.

But I’ve no shortage of unpublished ones.

Because it’s fun, I’m gonna post mine too. Here’s the rundown:

1986 - Identity
My attempt at a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, heavily influenced by Steve Jackson’s Creature of Havoc (my favorite in the series). You play a wordless brute trying to figure out who you are - or were; your enemies have magicked you into monstrous form to prevent your interfering with their nefarious plans.

1987 - The Heroes of Goodlund
My desired addition to the Dragonlance canon, focusing on heroes from a remote area of the Ansalon map who matched, nearly to the race/class/orientation, the existing Heroes of the Lance. I outlined the entire book in the spirit of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s original trilogy. Basic monkey-see, monkey-do.

1988 - Stones
Almost a direct ripoff of Michael Crichton’s Sphere, with giant extraterrestrial chunks of obsidian subbing in for an otherworldly sentient globe. I was learning a lot of new words thenabouts, so I eschewed Crichton’s spare, screenplay-ready style for extremely long sentences crammed full of mouthfuls like “plenipotentiary”.

1990 - The Sixth
Clive Barker and J.D. Salinger were retrofitting my brain by now, so this time I mixed big words and florid prose with counter-cultural pretensions. A disagreeable fellow eats his entire body, while alive, to “prove a point to society”. When he awakens in the afterlife, he gets his own personal Virgil to guide him through ethereal strata of meaning - and correct his self-eating ways.

1992 - The Twilight
Blown away by William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, I tried to convert the events of a cyberpunk roleplaying session I was game-master for into narrative format. I ran out of plot when the gang stopped playing. Strangely, I didn’t try to ape Gibson’s poetic wording; my own voice was starting to emerge here.

1995 - Roadfolk
Not understanding Douglas Coupland’s method of jam-packing encyclopedic pop detail into his stories of godless youth fumbling toward epiphany (but wanting to duplicate it nonetheless), I ported a notebook around with me, scribbled copiously, and later tried to assemble the jots and thoughts into a plot about city-born youngsters trying to become adults out in the country. Four years later, after countless changes and rewrites, this once-novel turned into my Nicholl semifinalist screenplay.

1998 - That Problem Child
Started as a short story, alternated between a screenplay and a comic book script, and eventually ended up as my first mostly-finished novel. I may finish it yet. It’s about the future, but I’m not sure it’s science-fiction. The idea grows from my wondering what high school might look like a few decades down the road.

From 1998 through 2005, I was trying to become a professional screenwriter. I wrote ten scripts, had one optioned, and even tried a few literary adaptations. It was when I was working on the last of these adaptations I realized I was far too interested in wordplay to continue pursuing a career where the end product is images and sounds, not sentences in sequence.

And so I returned to my first love, the novel.

It was the top of 2006. Inlanders happened.

Will it join the unpublished list above?

Time tells.

- Stephen Reese