More Books I've Never Finished

There was a book I started to write in high school that was about a hobo-ish folksinger who had ESP and could manipulate his audience and those around him and ended up in my home town where he found a girl who had the same gift but she thought she was mad and was being treated for hearing voices. There was an evil father trying to track him down to turn the kid's powers to some money making scheme. I think I wrote about 100 hand written pages before letting it die a natural death. I don't remember if I still have a copy.

It became a novel I did write called "Landmarks" which was written, but very badly. I only submitted it once and was told it would need major rewriting to be publishable. ("Landmarks" was written in long hand and I paid a typist to type it up.) "Landmarks" was about a draft resister returning from Canada to kill his father.

The was another 100,000 word novel "The Lone Seeker" about a alcoholic pressman in New Orleans and his friends and robbing a bookie and getting in trouble. I never rewrote it. I worked on it during the first 3 years of my marriage to Cynthia. It barely had a plot- both the marriage and the novel.

There was a stage play about a girl in a low rent apartment in LA who has the murder weapon from a killing in the building and is seduced by the murderer is his attempt to get it back. It has a couple of different names and was never finished.

There was a three part thing that had no title (Head, Heart & Soul) -something like that about a threesome in Louisiana where the woman is dying from a heart condition and the two men want to kill each other. My first writers' group in LA pretty much tore it to ribbons. Too stream of consciousness, I suppose.

There was about 10-15 short stories that I wrote in New Orleans that were supposed to fit together like Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio"- I was going to call it "Flies" Most of them didn't work, and most were never rewritten.

There are a few things that are not published that are finished, so we can't count them.

I had a meeting with an agent that I was connected with from the USC MPW program (this was '94) who asked me why I wanted to change careers at my age. I couldn't answer her.