Failure to launch.

Sure, we big-time writers have a lot of manuscripts in our drawers that never took flight. Heck, we have a lot of things in our drawers! Paper clips, for one thing. (Don't judge me.) But I think it's safe to say every author has some books that seemed good in conception but never really got going on the page. 

Sometimes it's not just our own ideas that were faulty. Oftentimes someone will suggest a project that sounds solid, but turns out to be a bad fit. This can mean hours of work wasted on something that winds up as useful as a dead cockatoo in a diving bell. 

Here are some of the fiction and nonfiction projects I've started on that wound up in the drawers of doom. And if you've ever put on drawers of doom, you'll know how unpleasant that is. 

Here I Sit, Broken Hearted: A Treasury of Great Public Bathroom Poetry

Cooking the Easter Island Way 

Make Big Money with Macramé 

Candace Sets Her Cheese on Fire: A Novel

101 Fart Jokes for Every Occasion 

Bang Gunly and the Varmints from Varmintville (with Mike Flangepart)

Bobbing for Durian and Other Party Games

The Crafty Schmafty Guide to Home Shoemaking

War and Peace II: More War, A Little Peace

Great Fight Songs of the Peloponnesian War

A Pound of Butter: The Shopping Lists of J. R. R. Tolkien

Scent in the Wind (a romance novel about a plucky woman and a trash collector with srs abs)

Lose Ten Pounds a Day--Look Great for Your Friends and Pallbearers

Howitzer Cozies and Other Ordnance Knitting Patterns

It Hurts When I Do This: Report from the 39th World Health Organisation Conference

Nuclear Armaments for Nitwits

Zero Whiskey Tango 4-Niner (never knew what it was about but there were guns and targets and men silhouetted on the cover; supposed to be written under the pseudonym Clom Tancy)

The Cat Who Was a Goldfish: Trans-Pets in America 

A History of Indicia

I Have a Red Pencil Box: Important Foreign Phrases

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So you see, I could have had a lot more books out for sale if I had stuck to it with these ideas. Alas, they were not meant to be. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm running up on the deadline for my next novel, How Green Was My Focaccia.