Abandoned ideas still carry weight

I might be a mature and sophisticated 50-year-old now, but I'm still quietly fuming over Yoda's 'there is no try' thing. There are a lot of more important things to worry about in this fucked-up world of ours right now, but that doesn't change the fact that I still think that that little piece of snot is totally wrong.

I like to try, and keep trying, and there are things I don't give up on, because the effort is the thing. And ideas for creative endeavors might get abandoned, but that doesn't mean they're forgotten forever.

Sure, I might not finish the ratty unfinished novel that I found in a box under the new house the other day. Any digital versions of that novel were lost several computers ago, so it only exists on the paper I printed out at my office job in 1997, but it does still exist, and it is truly terrible.

The lack of any kind of plot might be an issue. It's about someone who is walking down the street one day, and then decides that nothing means anything and goes on a roaring rampage of violence and donuts. I got to the part where the Reservoir Dogs analogues show up (c'mon, it was the mid-90s) when it stopped, but it took about 30,000 words to get that far. And I'm never going to finish that.

I found this tatty thing in the bottom of a box of stuff that I've lugged around for decades and inexplicably held onto (although I did deeply enjoy the surprisingly deep analysis of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol that I printed off that same work computer in 1997 that was slightly stuck to pages of the unfinished novel), and that box had all sorts of writings I'd done over the years

Apart from the 20 years of journalism, which is responsible for tens of thousands of stories, articles and assorted essays, I haven't been published very much, but I've never let being an abject failure of a human being stop me from trying, and I've start to write dozens of things with great eagerness, only to lose the thread and move on to something else.

There's a movie script I did about a black ops kill squad infected by empathy that will forever be two-thirds done, or the bright idea I had 20 years ago for a story featuring Hannibal Lecter in 1840s New Zealand, and never got more than a handful of pages into.

But you never abandon these ideas, they never go away. I never stopped thinking about that last one, and have recently been inspired  to actually do that last one as a rip-roaring pulp novel (the epiphany that led to this desire to finish it was that the story needed 100 percent more Wulf Sternhammer).

I still haven't given up on the sequel to The Man From LOVE - which features lots of vampires and lots of time-travel, because I like stories about vampires and I like stories about time travel. I'm almost exactly halfway through a three-novel series about the city of Auckland that might take another 10 years to finish, and I haven't added to that in a few months, but came up with another idea for a chapter for the third book at the local park the other day, and I do need to get that down someday. 

There's also unrealised ambitions to write Judge Dredd and Doctor Who stories which nobody needs to know about, and I've had plenty of ideas around that, and have been making them over and over in my head, with just a few scraps committed to the written word

Actually, my Doctor Who ideas might make a decent post for the blog in the future, so maybe I will share my thoughts on The Second Life of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Because as much as I like to abandon things, this here blog is the one creative strand that keeps on going, and keeps on giving.

And now I'm here, years and years later, and I'm still thinking about how I'd end that first novel, even though I never will write another word, I wonder where that first character went, all the way into homicidal indifference at the norms of society. My brain goes places, and sometimes I follow it, and sometimes I like to let it get away from me.