Writing the unpublishable

Writers write. Instead of making any one project the end-all-be-all of my writing journey, I’m trying to have fun along the way and get better as I go.

I’m nearly 4000 words into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Resurrection. It’s a sequel to the first TMNT movie from the 90’s. It treats the two sequels as if they never happened, and my goal is to maintain the tone of that movie while expanding into some of the compatible lore. I’ve set the word count goal to 75,000 words.

Why would I go to that effort when I can never publish it?

I think this mindset is one to guard against. It envisions a world where a successful novelist writes their first novel, publishes it, and then makes millions of dollars from it. The reality of a successful novelist (not personal experience, but having read or listened to many successful authors on the topic) is that you write a lot of books that no one ever reads until finally, if it happens at all, a publisher picks up novel 10 or 12.

So my first reason for writing this novel is that you shouldn’t take each book so seriously. It’s more important to be prolific.

While writing my last two novels, I’ve definitely noticed my own growth. I’ve developed a process for novel writing where I confidently can produce a novel within a year. I was writing on my last novel, Decimation, for six months. Since then, I’ve been learning more about the craft of writing and I’m looking forward to applying it.

Apart from self-improvement, I want to care about what I write. Like a lot of people online, I feel the fandom was robbed of any good TMNT stories since that first movie. I think I can do better.