Once upon a time, I was a writer.
I still am, I suppose, even if my professional output is measured more in characters than words these days. But what I’m referring to is fiction.
A couple of months ago, I was going through an old box of stuff and came across a CD-R labeled, My Writing. Ooh, intriguing! I had no idea what was on there and was dying to find out. There was just one small problem: I had no way to access the contents. Laptops no longer come with CD/DVD drives; digital archives long ago were relegated to The Cloud, a mystical-sounding, invisible repository in the sky.
(Not really, but every time I try to explain the cloud to my mom, it comes out sounding like fanciful gibberish. No wonder she’s so confused.)
Luckily, external CD/DVD drives are cheap, so I bought one from Amazon for less than $20. When I connected it to my laptop and opened the CD, I found a bunch of files I was expecting and one I wasn’t.
My first four manuscripts, all unpublished, are on there. In 1999, I tried my hand at writing a novel, which I called Beacon Rock. The two main characters I brought to life in that book made appearances in my next two: Stabbing Nature and Colored Red, which followed the exploits of an eco-terrorist group called Earth Fights Back and their maniacal leader, Drake, who embraces murder to gain attention. If this sounds familiar, I borrowed the concept but scrapped the original plot and almost everything else and turned it into my standalone published novel, No Time for Kings, a decade later.
There’s another manuscript on there called The Lion in the Grass. It’s a thinly veiled semi-autobiographical story about a married father who is disenchanted with his life and sets out on a weekend adventure with coworkers in search of Bigfoot in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. I like the concept, but the story makes me cringe. One agent who took the time to read the first three chapters praised my writing but said the plot was too slow-paced and was obviously a middle-aged male fantasy. Whoopsie. Her feedback was invaluable, and I took her critique to heart: she said unless you’re a well-established author, you need to jump right into the action, which is why No Time for Kings begins with a bang.
She also told me if I ever wanted an agent to take me seriously, I needed to stop double-spacing after periods. I quit cold turkey twenty years ago and have never looked back.
Anyway. I figured those four manuscripts were on the disc. What surprised me was the folder titled, Stories and Poems. It contains no fewer than a dozen ideas for future novels – some clearly in the brainstorming stages, half-finished thoughts and vague plot outlines – but a few are more detailed and partially written. I’d largely forgotten about these, so it was a kick revisiting them. Here are a few of my favorites, complete with my original notes copied verbatim.
- Deer in the Headlights: What would happen if you woke up one morning to find everybody you knew and trusted – as well as those you’ve never met – trying to kill you? 34 year old Paul Morgan has everything: a loving wife, teenage daughter, and a great job. One morning he wakes up and finds himself being pursued by both friends and strangers, running for his life, trapped like a deer in the headlights – and he has no idea why. (This one includes a brief outline with a delicious twist at the end, and two pages from the first chapter.)
- 39 1/2: Story of a group of people trapped in an elevator between the 39th and 40th floors of a high-rise building in downtown Portland. Unbeknownst to them, a murder has been committed in an office on one of the higher floors – and the murderer is on the elevator. Security, believing this to be the case, stops the elevator, trapping everybody inside. The person who picks up the telephone to call for help will be told this; will he share the information with the others?
- Paradise. Family on vacation in Hawaii to reconnect, but the experience only pulls them apart. Husband falls for hula girl on catamaran cruise, wife is interested in Don Ho-like local singer. Daughter is always writing in diary, details vacation from her point of view. Son is younger, shy and sensitive, wannabe poet. Finds sister’s diary, learns secret. (I completed seven pages, jumping between diary entries and real-time action. I see shades of “American Beauty” here.)
- The Road to Nowhere. Man is stuck in cab of his truck, buried in snow on a remote logging road. Survives for nine weeks, chronicles it all in a journal – eventually dies of starvation. (Ouch. That’s dark. And similar to “Into the Wild.”)
- Timestop. One day, time stops for everybody but the protagonist. People freeze in place, while he is free to move about at his will. At first he is overjoyed by the endless possibilities – living wherever he wants, eating whatever he wants, and not paying for a thing. He finds that whoever he touches comes to life for a single hour. He can pick and choose his friends at will, surrounding himself with beautiful girls if he desires, or weak-minded people who will perceive him as a god.
- Sixty Second Exposure. Man has the ability to look at a photograph and be transported into the picture for sixty seconds at a time. He can not physically alter events but can speak and be heard, i.e. he could transport himself to the location where the photographer stood who took the pictures of Kennedy’s assassination. He could yell “Duck!” but couldn’t physically stop the assassination from taking place. His “soul” would transport itself into the body of the person taking the picture. He can only transport himself into a photograph once, so it’s all or nothing each time he does so. He has to be careful when trying to change the outcome of an event, as that could affect all of history. (Includes notes and a partial first chapter.)
What an interesting bunch of story ideas! A thriller, a whodunnit, a family drama, a couple of science-fictiony concepts. I clearly wasn’t pigeonholing myself into any particular genre.
But wait! There’s more! Like a handful of (embarrassing) poems. A random blog post from the early 2000s. Ten paragraphs’ of dialogue, a scene without a story, that eventually made it into No Time for Kings. And my sole attempt at a short story, which I actually kind of like.
It surprises me how seriously I took my fiction writing between 1999-2005. Not just the four fully completed manuscripts, but all these future stories, waiting only to be written.
The CD-R, it turns out, was a treasure trove of discovery and inspiration. Younger Mark was full of dreams and ambition, convinced he would make it as an author or die trying.
So, what happened? My marriage fell apart in 2006. Not only was this emotionally devastating, but I was now a single dad with a mortgage, a car payment, and shared custody of two young children. I had bigger priorities than writing, so that fell by the wayside. Luckily, as my life settled down, I returned to No Time for Kings in 2009, completing it two years later.
I spent a couple of hours Sunday afternoon reading through all these stories, and was then so motivated, I worked on my sequel to NTFK for a while. I started this last March; it’s embarrassing how little I have completed. If slow and steady wins the race, I’m primed for a gold medal, baby!
One more thing: I think some of those long-abandoned ideas have potential. I might even consider revisiting them at some point in the future and could use your help.
Do any of these story ideas resonate with you? Which one(s) would you be most interested in reading?
Mark My Words 
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