While I'm not prone to, I sometimes have to tell people that I've written an as-yet-unpublished novel. When I do this, I am compelled to tell them two things:
1. It's not about vampires.
2. It's not about people breaking up.
I do this because I need to distance myself from the big bucket of suck that the whole concept of "unpublished novel" falls into. Most great books were at some point unpublished, but it is the perpetually unpublished books that I don't want mine being associated with. Basically, the bad ones. The product of somebody some day deciding they should just get it over with and write that book, perhaps in the midst of an endorphine high caused by a Tony Robbins conference or an eighth reading of The Secret.
If you forced somebody with no real skill or ambition to write a novel, it would most likely end up being about either vampires or people breaking up.
The people who write about vampires are either angry teenagers obsessed with goth culture and think that Ann Riceian vampires represent some idealistic reality, or just uncreative horror-and/or-action freaks who need easy fodder for their gunslinging hero with infinite ammo or a force of antagonism to slaughter ancillary characters without any need for establishing a back story or plot.
The people who write about breaking up are the distraught twentysomethings who've been at the receiving end of one too many aborted relationships and think they have gained some grand insight into the human condition and are thereby compelled by forces of nature to create for us the ultimate Relationship Novel. People so trapped in their own minds that they think the height of human drama is an ended dating spree.
Don't think me supercilious enough to consider myself the best writer ever or anything. I know my book isn't the bees knees and that it doesn't hold up a mirror to society or anything. I can't even talk about originality, since this story I cooked up happened to turn out to be a slight... homage to the Bourne Identity before I was even aware of the book-cum-movie (if you can believe it, after I'd seen the film I had to change a lot of the details to prevent it from seeming more like Ludlum's character).
All I'm saying is that I'm better than the people who write unpublished novels about vampires or breaking up.
The last group I gave that brief counter-description to replied with, "Ah, but it is about vampires who break up?" and I instantly knew what my next novel would be about.
Zombies falling in love.
As a brief literary aside, Rice's Interview with the Vampire essentially is about vampires breaking up.
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