NaNo 2023: Failed First Chapters

Hello there!

I have long been a fan of National Novel Writing Month, and credit it with having increased my output, especially in the early years. In 2010, I wrote 50,000 words of absolute garbage and have done it most years since then in one form or another, sometimes just adding 50,000 words onto an existing work. 2014/2015/2016 were all spent on adding to (and then finishing) The Dark Wizard of Donkerk, which can be read on my website in its still-unedited form, where it will stay until I can find the time or the publisher for it. 2022 was, of course, Thresholder.

This year, I decided that I wanted to try writing something that had more marketability, so during what I dubbed 'Draftober' I set out to write a bunch of starts to see what worked and what didn't. I think left to my own devices, I would probably end up writing epic fantasy about sad English majors wringing their hands about moral issues, the nature of narrative, gender and sexuality, the burdens of the future, and stuff like that, with the occasional fight scene or complicated romance thrown in. I think that's all well and good, but wanted to try something different, and perhaps more widely appealing, and dare I say, profitable.

Anyway, here's a link to the GDocs folder where the drafts are stored. 3, 4, and 9 are incomplete, with the last of those not even really being a story. 7 is missing, because that's the one I selected for NaNo 2023, Doomsday Pivot!, a system apocalypse story about a small startup that makes a sudden course correction when the end of the world comes with blue boxes in hand.

I don't fully endorse reading any of these, but if you have interest in first drafts and stories that I decided not to write for one reason or another, then you might get something from them. A few of these I might come back to when I have the bandwidth for them, and each was given a "rejection letter" to serve as a note to myself about what worked and what didn't, and why it wasn't selected for 2023.

In the past, I've done NaNo in the open, posting whatever got written that day, but this year it's going to be kept private. In theory, December will be the time to polish, and then January might be the time to share, but I'm keeping myself open right now, and using this NaNo as a time for experimentation. (The target is for this to be a new serial that would be posted to RoyalRoad with a huge backlog, written concurrently with Thresholder until the end of Thresholder, with its continuation depending on how well it's doing and either an early end or a late one, depending. But I'm very willing to throw all that work in the trash or course correct if needed, which is the point of keeping it private and considering it an experiment.)

Thanks for reading, if you choose to, and any comments below would be appreciated.