SOMETIMES I sit here drinking a good single malt and ponder my Ghost Novels. Well, let’s be honest: I sit here drinking a good single malt doing just about everything, to the point where Orbit has assigned me my own handler who attempts to stop or at least slow down my drinking. God bless him, he’s an unpaid intern who I often overhear muttering darkly to himself about his lot in life, but Orbit feels it’s necessary because of a few recent incidents we managed to keep out of the papers through bribery, threats, and promises of community service to come. Legally, I can say no more.

Anyway, while my Handler—we’ll call him Jimmy for the purposes of this entry—searches my bathroom for bottles duct-taped to the back of the toilet tank, I’m taking a moment to think about writing, and this leads me to contemplate Ghost Novels. These are not unpublished novels, or novels I wrote for someone else, nor, strictly speaking, novels never written. A Ghost Novel is the novel your finished novel might have been, if you didn’t revise as you go.

I don’t know how other writers work; frankly, writers are an alarming group of people who overestimate their cool factor while underestimating the amount of time anybody, including other writers, wish to spend discussing the craft of writing, so I don’t talk much with the other writers. We stare at each other balefully like Maggie Simpson and the unibrow baby on The Simpsons when we meet in public, and rarely speak. When I’m working on a novel, I often realize at certain points that I’ve taken a wrong turn. It’s difficult to explain the feeling: The work you’ve just done is not bad, per se, it just suddenly doesn’t feel right. Sometimes this goes only a few paragraphs back. Sometimes it goes several chapters, and every now and then in a life-threatening moment of despair the feeling can encompass an entire, nearly-finished novel. What I usually do in these moments is simply delete what I had already written and start over.

So that’s what I ponder: When I select six pages of work and delete it, there’s a Ghost Novel: In some alternate universe split off from that moment, I didn’t delete that portion of the work and go down another route, and thus a different novel gets written. Since I do this fairly often as I write (being an inveterate Pantser), there must be thousands of Ghost Novels out there in the multiverse.

Believe it or not, up until a few years ago I wrote everything on a typewriter, so there were physical leavings of Ghost Novels – most of which I still have, mouldering away in files. In the digital age I don’t keep everything I delete, on the not-unreasonable assumption that no one is ever going to care about the six pages I deleted from chapter 23 or the two-hundred words I deleted from the epilogue. Except me. And not always me, either, believe me. Are any of these Ghost Novels better than my ultimate results? We’ll never know, unless someday someone invents a way to see alternate universes and we find one where I have several Nobel Prizes and busts of me adorn every university and library; woo, you think I drink too much now, if I ever find out my Ghost Novels could have gotten me there I will set world records for literary despair. When I read my Tarot Cards and see my future, I also see a moment of desperation where I owe Orbit one more novel, and I find 500 deleted scenes from various projects, stitch them together into a FrankenNovel, and mail it off, immediately departing for a secret location for my own safety.