In this new publishing world I am digging out some novels I wrote awhile ago and dusting them off. Ones I didn’t sell, for whatever reason. Whether I publish them or not depends on if they hold up to my (new and improved?) standards. As writers we can only hope we improve with every book. The one I’m looking at now I wrote before One O’clock Jump (2001). It’s called Night Fever… or maybe Slumberland… and is a thriller about a sleep clinic doc and a sleepwalker who sees (maybe) a murder while roaming the night.
First off, I see it’s almost a historical novel by now. I must have written in about 1997. Phone booths, tape players, and Madonna — oh my! Should I leave them in for “period detail” or edit them out? I think they have to go. So the work begins. And that’s just the superficial stuff, not the meat of the story, the writing itself, the various threads and subplots that all have to work together.
Interesting going through a novel I wrote so long ago. What was I thinking about then? Where was my head? Lots of politics in this novel which means I might have written (or at least started) it in a big election year, maybe 1996. I know that when I wrote Sweet and Lowdown, set in 1940 and involving Wendell Willkie and FDR in a fight for an unprecedented third term in office, I felt the repercussions around me daily. That was the year 2000. Now that was a political year, one that almost didn’t end before the calendar year.
I actually couldn’t remember what the story was about. Of course I skipped to the end and it all came flooding back. Family secrets — still one of my favorite themes. Who are we? A tangled mass of genetic material? The product of a weird family? The product of a loving family? An iconoclast striking out for individual freedom? A lost soul looking for connection? One of the joys of re-reading my own work — that few have clapped eyes on besides me — is the ability to massage those themes, to focus and tighten them, to edit out the crap (as usual.)
Will Night Fever make the cut? I don’t know yet. But I’m glad I copied it off my old PC and got it back in my mental circulation. Anybody who tells you editing something you wrote is harder than the first draft is lying. Slash and burn, here we come.
Lise McClendon 
Leaving one of my manuscripts and then not knowing what to do with them later is a phobia of mine, but you raise an excellent point. When old enough, you can turn it into a period piece or even satire.
For instance, you mentioned your 90s novel, its elements and I thought of American Psycho immediately.
Oooh. Yes, I do think there’s a psycho in there, Joe. Will get him weirder, just for you. 🙂
I have, sadly, about five novels in the drawer. Not all of them are worth the effort to breathe life back into them!