Inventory of novels I recently started but couldn't finish

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Over the past few years, while continuing to work on my final trilogy, I've also started a number of new novels that I just as quickly abandoned. (Each time I posted sections of them on social media, which is perhaps the main point.) When this has happened in the past, certain aspects of these unwritten books eventually end up in the book I do write, in both explicit and implicit ways.

I thought I would make a brief inventory of these failed attempts to see if, by writing about them in order, there is anything useful for me to learn:

Jealous Friend
A novel about an artist who is jealous of another artist. This is as far as I got: "Most of the time I don’t think about it. A year will have gone by, two years, three, and I won’t have considered the matter even once. But then there are other years that don’t pass so smoothly. This was one of those other years. It wasn’t anything specific that set me back on this once again wrong path. And this wasn’t anywhere near the worst time. But I truly thought I had let it go. So I was disappointed with myself, disappointed to find myself back in this particular mental space. I had escaped it before and would escape it again. But not quite yet. Then again, maybe there was something that had brought me here. A thought. Something that had occurred to me in a flash. Something I’d done to myself."

Jacob’s in a State of Decimation
Another attempt in a long line of attempts to write a fragmentary, autobiographical novel. An excerpt: "I chose the title Jacob’s in a State of Decimation because I thought it could be some kind of commercial suicide. It is a line from a Destroyer song. Because it is a line from a Destroyer song it seems only reasonable that the theme of this book becomes music. I really love music. In the past I have loved it so much I could barely bring myself to write about it. However, when I find myself in a state of decimation, music is where I go to help myself through." I was also thinking this could be a book imagining what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Toronto and never moved to Montreal.

The Fervour of the Newly Converted
An attempt to write a detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons. This idea has now appeared in many of my unfinished novels in one form or another. It has also had many different titles, including Desire Without Expectation (a title I've now used for many different unfinished books which will also be the title of my next published book forthcoming in 2027.). It often connects to the line: "To try, in some way, to break into my own writing style and damage it. To find the necessary balance between damage and healing. To more fully consider the many overlaps between making and unlearning." I also wrote: "A detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons, a detective novel with a twist and the twist is: there is no crime and no detective. A cross between a detective novel and a book-length poem."

Know Me Better Than I Know Myself
To avoid confusion, I am now calling this unfinished novel Know Me Better Than I Know Myself (though it was also previously called Desire Without Expectation) The short description I wrote at the time was: "Know Me Better Than I Know Myself is nothing if not hybrid. A cross between a diary, an essay, a poem, and a novel. This is not the book Jacob Wren set out to write, but rather the book he wrote in spite of himself. As he writes: “The world is a mess. And so am I. And so is this book.” And yet there are so many themes and (unfinished) stories." I often start writing these fragmented, autobiographical novels and then give up. I find them interesting for about ten pages but then get bored writing about my own life. Excerpts of this work were published in atmospheric quarterly, the International Times and a chapbook published by above/ground press.

One Yes & Many Know
A novel about an artist who decides to sell out. It was mostly just this one paragraph: "It would be like a Faust story, but instead of making a deal with the devil I would make a deal with myself. Up until now, I’d fully dedicated myself to art, and to living art ethically. But now something had changed. I was dissatisfied, and my dissatisfaction suddenly had a possible solution landing directly in the middle of it, as unexpected as a UFO. (Though hadn’t I always said: it’s my nature to be dissatisfied.) There was a success that had eluded me for as long as I could remember. Was my inability to achieve it due to some shortcoming in my work, or was it only because I’d never really tried? What would it mean to reach for the brass ring, and not stop reaching until it was fully in my grasp? I didn’t know but if there was ever a time to find out, it was now. I wasn’t planning to do so at the expense of anyone else, didn’t believe that would be necessary. But I was planning to focus on myself, on my own trajectory. A trajectory that was going to be convincingly upward. At all costs. This is what I began to repeatedly tell myself. What quickly became almost an obsession, taking over my life, while at the same time realizing I didn’t know much about success or how to achieve it."

The Biography
Inspired by people writing to me to say that the Luigi Mangione story reminded them of my 2016 novel Rich and Poor, this was going to be a strange kind of sequel. In it there is an author who's written a novel about a man who washes dishes for a living and decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. He is approached by a real life billionaire and asked to write the billionaire's biography. (I did finish the first chapter, which I think would work well as a stand alone short story, so I should probably try to get it published somewhere.) At the end of the first chapter someone kills the biography-subject-billionaire, and in the second chapter I was planning to have the assassin show up on the author's doorstep seeking shelter. I was thinking the rest of the book could be the author and assassin on the run. It seemed to me that all of this would work well, but I also felt I was writing a book I had already written, and I always prefer to try writing something completely different. One other thing: I was thinking of naming the author in the book Wolfgang Wren.

Grand Meeting of Failures
A novel about a group of people who try to start an art movement. I recently posted excerpts of it here and here. But I quickly realized I had no idea what the art movement could be, and if it wasn't something convincing (or at least convincing to me) I felt the book wouldn't get very far. As well, I feel I write too much about art, and I find my books more interesting when art is only one aspect of the narrative (since in some way all my books are about the relation between art and politics.) There were also a series of art movements in my novel Polyamorous Love Song, and I don't really like repeating myself. Though there will likely be some kind of art movements in my future books, it's a topic I can't seem to stay away from.

Money Selling Poison
This was an idea from only yesterday. I posted the opening here. I suppose the idea was to write my own version of Catcher in the Rye. Two sentences from my notes: "The “phonies” don’t know that capitalism is already over." "Just to be clear, I know that “Jacob Wren rewriting Catcher in the Rye to make it more woke” is a completely bonkers idea." From the opening it doesn't seem much like Catcher in the Rye, more like a book about going back to school. I like the opening but, the more I think about it, the more I feel I don't really want to write about school. Yet I'm clearly not certain what it is I do want to write about.

Most of the above ideas lasted for at least a couple of weeks, but Money Selling Poison lasted for less than twenty-four hours, which is perhaps what inspired me to take this inventory. Try to figure out if there's any through-line running through all these different ideas, and if there's some way I can use this through-line as an arrow pointing me in the right direction.

This all reminds me of an earlier moment of my writing life, slightly over ten years ago, when I also began a series of novels that I started but couldn't finish. At the time I posted excerpts of them as follows:

I want to start again (possible opening for a new book.)
Excerpt from I Want To Start Again
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #2
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #3
The Great Fire of Slander -- (yet another attempt at a new novel)
My Apologies

And yes, someday I am thinking of taking all of these unfinished fragments and putting them together as some kind of book of unfinished books. But for now, I feel I need to keep writing new books, since some days it seems to me that writing these novels is the only thing keeping me sane (though it obviously doesn't keep me all that sane.)

Two final thoughts, things I've posted in the past:

Between writing novels, I attempt to start writing new novels, many false starts. Why does one of the starts eventually take while the others don't? Not a reason but a feeling. Mostly a feeling that I don't know where it's going but I want to find out.

Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing. (Though for many of these ideas it ended up being a lot less than thirty pages.)



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