National Novel Writing Month comes to an end tonight—at midnight! But our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished will carry on. Here's the next entry.

Where are all my End of the World Party invitations? The characters in the novel I never finished—the promotion for which I foresaw myself being very busy with this month, incidentally, the timing of the book's publication being part of my brilliant meta marketing concept—were buried in End of the World Party invitations by now. In the mid-pre-post-apocalyptic world I imagined, December 23, 2012 was the new New Year's.

These parties would be taking [...]

As National Novel Writing Month continues on, the next in our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

The novel I never wrote is spotless. Every sentence is a sickening surprise. The plot coils round you like a python. Your eyes water badly at the humanist climax. You do not trust this response.

It is three hundred and twenty-nine pages long. It is at least fifty-four percent true and took six days to write. Seventeen people conspired against it, and each died under odd circumstances.

The text is political but not polemic, learned but not dense. It is charged with alarming [...]

As National Novel Writing Month slogs on, the next in our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

Do you remember the episode of "The Simpsons" where Marge scores the fake Chanel suit? She looks incredible in it, straight-up incredible, and then this rich bitch she went to high school with spots her and briefly ushers her into Springfield high society? Anyway, she has only the one fake Chanel suit, so she has to transform it into culottes and an evening gown, etc. in order to keep the illusion afloat, but ultimately she stays true to herself because of Homer and [...]

As National Novel Writing Month enters its final days, the next in our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

There's a novel I didn't write, and another novel that I did. I'll tell you about the second one first. It's finished—or notionally finished and objectively un-sold, although my agent tells me it received several posi-polite notes of no-thanks—and still here with me. It's in my head, and at least virtually is right there on this laptop's desktop, where it is both ostensibly complete and current through my last idle tinkerings with it, which I made on a slow and stop-full [...]

As National Novel Writing Month slogs on, the next in our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

I have never really aspired to write anything that you might consider literary fiction, finding its style—what the late Dennis Potter so memorably defined as "he said, she said, descriptions of the sky"—to be terminally tiresome, but about fifteen years or so back, when I was still young enough to think I could pull it off but (as it turns out) too old to really have the energy to get it together, I came up with the idea for a novel that I [...]

As National Novel Writing Month gets underway, here's the first in a month-long series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

In the fall of 1998, I was at UC Berkeley, mired in the early stages of a history Ph.D. program that, even in a best-case scenario, would last until 2003 and then spit me out into an increasingly tenuous academic job market—and my performance in grad school so far didn't necessarily promise a best-case scenario. I had few friends and had just had my heart broken rather badly; the latter, thankfully, served as a catalyst for some life reforms. 18 months later, [...]

As National Novel Writing Month enters its final days, the next in our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

Sometime in 2006, I was lying in bed, kind of drunk and thinking about zombies, and I had a thought. In a world (the voiceover in my head went) in which both vampires and zombies existed, who would be forced to be humanity's friend? Vampires, because if all the people turned into zombies, the vampires would have nothing to eat. But in a world where both vampires and zombies existed, what's the worst thing that could happen? No, not vambies, dummy… [...]

As National Novel Writing Month slogs on, here's the next in our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

My first serious attempt to write a novel was, somewhat unfortunately, inspired by The Da Vinci Code. I was a college sophomore when I decided to try NaNoWriMo, and a few months into a busy school year, The Da Vinci Code and its cousin The Rule of Four were probably the last books I had read for fun. I was a medieval history and literature major particularly obsessed with England, and my moment of book inspiration came while thinking about the 12th-century [...]