Right now I have the second draft of the first novel I ever wrote loaded into Scrivener, as well as somewhere between 800 and 1000 words (i.e. almost nothing) of a third draft. While it makes sense to me that I’ve stalled out on this project, especially given a panoply of other projects in my personal queue (mostly around gaming), having this draft sitting there is a bit of an itch, something that pulls at my writing sensibilities in a way I likely won’t be able to ignore. And, as of recently, the shape of some of my other writing has reminded me that yes, I do want to finish this story.

As I’ve mentioned once or twice on this site (and covered frequently on my old one), the first novel I ever wrote is a coming-of-age story with the working title of Fratricide. It’s about a recent college grad, Scott, who’s faced with spending a fifth year on campus as he struggles to find a job. Through the story Scott is pulled into some shenanigans involving a couple of the fraternities on campus, including the one he was a member of. As the story progresses, Scott must figure out how to leave the safety of campus, which parts of his life come with him, and which parts are left behind.

The timing of this story has irked me for multiple reasons through its inception. First off, I wrote the first draft in 2009 when I was the same age (and going through some of the same stuff) as the protagonist. When I picked up that draft in 2016 with the intent to rewrite it, I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to do the story justice with the amount of time that had passed. That said, my writing had improved to the point that my closeness to the subject matter was not going to save the first draft, a weird, over-the-top and frankly ludicrous story that involved human trafficking, the mob, and assassins hanging out on college campuses.

The second draft does a better job of being grounded, but runs into other issues that mostly stem from the fact that I wrote it over a period of five years. I started the second draft in 2016, put it down fairly quickly when I feared that I was just going to go as wacky as I did the first time around, then picked it back up in 2019 and slowly eked out a 67,000 word manuscript mostly during the pandemic. I was pretty proud of this, and happy that I had put together a story that made sense. When I started dating my current partner, an avid reader, I handed her the manuscript. She (because I asked her to) tore it apart, red pen flying through the story. I noticed something very clear, though; the frequency and severity of the edits declined as you got through the story, which is important because I wrote the draft completely in order. After I took a moment to salve my ego, I went through the notes and saw throughlines, as well as an understanding of how much shakier the first half of the book’s writing was compared to the second. It was time for more editing.

That editing stalled out for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that editing is much more difficult, less immediately gratifying work than the writing is, and since I do (kind of) write professionally, it was harder to spend my energy on. The other thing, though, was that I got into NaNoWriMo in 2022, and between 2022 and 2024 produced over 150,000 words of fiction between three additional manuscripts. It helped cement the fact that I really enjoyed writing fiction for myself and that I should do more of it.

That ‘for myself’ bit is important. When I wrote the first draft I was sure I wanted to put in the work to become a published author; I got way, way ahead of myself reading blogs like QueryShark before my first draft was even done. This made me feel even more discouraged when the first draft started unraveling as I edited it, and may have been one of the reasons I had so much trouble getting back into writing fiction for fun in my 20s. By the time I finally did do NaNoWriMo in 2022, it was a combination of accountability (my partner did it with me) and allowing myself to write something goofy and guilty pleasure enough (a serial numbers filed off video game fanfic set in the far future on a foreign planet) that made the process, intense as it was, fun. Writing is fun. Writing is fun even if you never get ‘really published’.

After nearly a decade of never being ‘really published’ but still finding an audience thanks to Cannibal Halfling Gaming, I decided that I needed to keep writing, keep being creative. As much as activation energy is still a thing (which is why these posts rarely go up first thing in the morning on Monday), I really do enjoy writing and seeing the scenarios flow out of me. Making the characters in my stories into people is much more work than doing the same in an RPG (especially if you’re only playing the game and not running it) but it’s so worth it, and often means you want to edit and polish those stories even if publishing is out of the question.

For me, writing the stories about Nat (and yes, part 3 should be out this month) opened up a can of worms that got me thinking about my reticence around editing Fratricide and potentially doing another partial or complete rewrite. I’m nearly 40 now, my concerns about writing about college are still there, but when writing Nat Meets Donnie it hit me: I want to write these stories. It may be self-indulgent, but as we went over before, I’m probably not going to get published. This is for me. For some reason it took playing DIE and seeing those characters stick with me to remind myself that yes, you can just make characters for the fun of it and write stories for the fun of it. It’s okay to admit that my college years are going to be evergreen topics for me, using writing to work through both my questions about what made me who I am but also reliving heady times where your whole future sat before you and living life to the fullest meant going out and making mistakes. This isn’t a hidden part of me; my love of games like the DIE RPG and Masks are obvious tells that that’s how my nostalgia manifests.

And that’s ok. If anything, it’s probably healthier to use writing as a lens to investigate how you grew up, how you changed, and where the people that were around you then all went. I don’t necessarily want nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ to leak into my everyday life. I do still have a lot of friends from when I was in college, but when it comes to my fraternity brothers, the exact relationships that my story was always trying to interrogate, I don’t really keep up with most of them anymore. Our lives are all very different now and, as much as I don’t want to admit it, I probably saw that coming even the first time I wrote this story, back when I was 22.

I don’t exactly know when I’m going to really commit to editing this story; my current projects, both around RPGs, are going to take priority for some time. Maybe, if the chaos level declines, I will use this November as ‘NaNoEdMo’, something I said was going to do last year but backed off from due to a number of factors. But I think I do want to hold myself to revising the story. On one hand, I don’t want to throw it out whole cloth again, but on the other it’s going to require a fair amount of work and some developmental editing. One big sore spot around the previous draft was that I introduced and fleshed out characters in the back half of the story, in some cases characters who should have really been there all along. That means there’s a whole lot of rewriting to do, especially at the beginning. I’m also contemplating the events of the plot and wondering how best to tweak them. It’s all a bit heavy handed, now, but honestly adding in something just a bit crazier might actually make the story better.

Whether editing Fratricide or not, I do want to commit to more writing and more fiction. Writing two pieces every week has likely been good for me, but I’ve been spending more time scrambling and less time actually putting thought towards everything, which isn’t ideal. I also need some more distractions from the outside world, especially as my job does mandate a certain amount of reading the news, psychic damage or no. Once I finish my currently running RPG campaign and have a bit of mental energy freed up, it’ll likely be time to figure out a more proactive way to put some time against all my projects. And yeah, I do think I want to truly finish this story.