I have wanted to be a fantasy authour for as long as I can remember. Maybe in the beginning it wasn't strictly fantasy, having influences from historical fiction instead, but still. It has been at least thirty years. I've managed to complete a few novellas, but nothing I was overly interested in attempting to get published. I am currently working on two fantasy novels with at least two on the back burner, as well as a series of science-fiction novellas. This page is for mentioning them.
I had the idea to write a fantasy novel, one chapter a week, sharing on Substack as I go. No worldbuilding, no outline, no editing. The goal was 52 chapters, but after 26 it was too much of a mess for me to continue.
Now I've started worldbuilding, with the intent of writing a rough outline, and plan to rewrite when I've finished. The real point of this project was to demonstrate how bad that first draft would be, and how it is still possible to salvage it.
Questions like "what if Hogwarts was a university instead of a secondary school?", "what if there was a Men in Black, but for fairies?", and "what if Supernatural was set in Canada?" led to this project. Does it deliver on any of those concepts? Of course not. Is it really half a dozen short stories and/or novellas crammed together and unified by a tenuous overarching plot? Maybe.
The first point of view is Johnny, who turns eighteen but isn't accepted to any post-secondaries while his friends all leave twon. He goes to stay with his grandmother only to find himself on a train to the Castle Unknown, an otherworldly place Canadians go to learn magic.
The second is Barney, who loses his job, his girlfriend, and his grandparents in less than a week. He inherits an antique car that doesn't look roadworthy, inside of which are instructions to go to his granduncle's derelict estate, kicking off a series of bizarre encounters that lead to him learning that Detective with the Men in Pink is a hereditary office.
The next point of view is going to be Gregory, an untrained junior-high boy whose emerging magic has a habit of making bras come to life and escape their wearer. He's whisked away to Pagan Lake Academy, where he he learns about the larger magical community.
Then there is Abigail, whose parents are part of a secret society that she has been groomed for, about to be presented as available for courting after her eighteenth birthday. Revolted by the pompous decadence, she seeks a way out.
After that there will be a group of young women who find themselves spending a summer working at a Renaissance Faire where odd things are happening, including a rumoured sex cult. United by their experience, they enter content creation, landing them a sponsorship deal to attend an adult summer camp and vlog their experience. Supernatural shenanigans turn that into a nightmare of a disaster. Then their fanbase buys them a castle ruin on a Scottish isle that comes with the "if you stay three nights" trope. They get stuck in a time loop.
There is also a vague concept of a magical high school aboard a ship. Maybe a tall ship, more likely an ocean liner.
In High School I started writing a fantasy novel about a teenage boy at the Acadamy (spelled wrong, I know), a castle that was also a school of magic. I hadn't even heard of Harry Potter yet, as I believe it was only 1999. It wasn't very good, of course, though I did type it out and put it on a geocities site.
I tried rewriting it a few times over the years, even completing several rounds of self-editing of the first novel (it became a trilogy when I added a plot), but it was only about 36k words, so more of a novella. Unless I wrote the whole trilogy as one volume.
The plot I came up with for that rewrite was that thousands of years ago, the empire fell when a demon too powerful to be controlled, Korvalas, was summoned. Ever since, any sort of magical portal or teleportation briefly allowed demons to come to the material plane, known as the Curse of Korvalas. After some hijinks, Micjimble is sent off on an expedition, during which he accidentally stumbles onto the sight of Korvalas' defeat -- which is revealed to actually be imprisonment. Korvalas is released, Micjimble nearly dies, there is divine intervention, Korvalas is sent back to Hell. The Curse is lifted, yay!
The second book, "Return of Korvalas", occurs when someone with an unhealthy hatred for Micjimble makes a deal with Korvalas and helps him return. The third book, "Death of Korvalas", follows Micjimble and company as they go to Hell to kill Korvalas there so they can be done with him for good.
I'm not certain I want to keep that plot, but I also don't know what I would replace it with. The original concept was a whimsical comedy; switching to a gritty action-adventure was a bit strange.
This was going to be about a boy of either six or eleven (depending which atempt I'm talking about) who goes to a summer camp, but the journey there repeatedly goes wrong in minor ways that kids that age have no prblem turning into adventures. It is entirely based on a few scenes I came up with and want a way to use in a larger work of some kind.
Scene one is exploring a beach looking for treasures like shells, rocks, and driftwood while waiting for a train to arrive. It occurs after the first leg brings them to this world, whether that is a ferry or a different train.
Scene two is something causes the train to stop on or before a bridge, which the boy falls off of into a swamp. There a witch turns out to be kind and teaches him some basics about shamanistic magic and making totems. This lesson enables him to return to the train.
I wrote Robin Hood in Space a few years ago for nanowrimo. It was barely half the expected length. But it was fun.
The next story was going to be Sherlock Holmes in Space, but that turned out to be significantly more difficult to outline in a way that gave me confidence.
Other classics I had planned to add to my "in Space" universe included The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Three Musketeers, Robinson Crusoe, and The Swiss Family Robinson.