Confidence Boost? Or shameful secret!

Lol Zoombie. I actually enjoyed reading them -- so darn funny!

Well, your spelling sure sucked, but who can resist someone called Napalme "Napalm" Cobra?

Fortunately I've destroyed all copies, but when I was an angsty teenager I wrote...




wait for it...






LOTR fanfic... poetry.



I remember a bit of it. It was as bad as you think.

The first short story I remember writing (circa third grade) had the MC undergo a series of adventures starting with being lost in a cave, stumbling across animate Nazi skeletons, and swinging to safety across a bottomless pit, only to wake up and realize it was all a dream.

Yikes.

This was followed by fevered Catholic schoolgirl fantasies involving Jesus as space alien and vengeful aborted fetuses who liked to lurk under the Romaine lettuce in vegetable bins.

Double yikes!

Then there was the epic alternative Civil War history that was somehow tied into Don McLean's "American Pie." This was during my Star Trek fanfic stage. I shipped Dr. McCoy. Bones, I still love ya.

Beyond yikes.

How about Elton John fan fiction? Wrote a whole novel about a thinly disguised Elton and a blatant Mary Sue who drew portraits of tourists in Picadilly Square. Was I ever pissed when the school lit journal turned this one down.

Next came the fictional bio of George Sand. This one was actually not bad.

Then the Star Wars fanfic stage. Oh, and the world's only known Samuel Taylor Coleridge fanfic. Tasty.

Sadly almost all this juvenilia has been lost. Some days you just need a really good laugh.

I posted this a while back, and I'm not sure it's a horror story, but here's something I wrote in 1990.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1915700&postcount=58

Besides my fixation with naming all of my characters after each other, I thought it was pretty good for a soon-to-be seventh grader. (And I won't even mention that the MC in my current WIP is named Alix...)

Nicole

As often as my computers kick it, I doubt I have any of my old writing, except in some notebooks and perhaps on floppy...though I don't even have a drive for that anymore (man, I feel old). Last time I saw it, though, I remember thinking the writing was so very awful. Mind you, I still like the ideas, so I may actually get back to them one day - I know my very first idea like the back of my hand at this point.

I found something a few weeks ago on a.. FLOPPY DISK. Found a whole stack of the things, and started combing through them. A couple I think I can scrub the teenage angst off and salvage, others... well... it's perfectly believable that such old storage devices are corrupted. Right? RIGHT???

The evolution of the writer is never shameful, but often painful. I finished my first published work in 1998 (coauthored), we edited the work, re-edited it, had friends look over the work and then re-edited it, submitted it to publishers – re-edited it, and finally did three serious time consuming rounds with the editors of the publishing house and (you guessed it) re-edited it. The thought was that it was being polished, and if one was to review the original draft copy with the final version, they might say – “wow, a distinct improvement!” But, I had a chance to go back recently and look over the published work and right away I began seeing errors, typos and the like. By the way, I also find such things in novel that I’ve purchased too. Nonetheless, this prompted me to go back many years and look at some old writings that I had done – to call them stories would be inaccurate, for they are actually just fragmented story ideas really. When I was a lad in high school and college – I was an abysmal writer – I still can’t spell to save my life (Mad Cow maybe…)! LOL So, looking back at those early scrawlings after having completed an undergraduate and graduate degree, and writing 3 manuscripts of my own work, I realized one thing – I’m a work in progress. I imagine that in twenty or so years, I will look back at what manuscripts I’ve written and say, “Wow, what a piece of crap – what was I thinking!” Or, maybe it will be my cyborg brain carrying robot that actually says that – who knows. Nonetheless, just like social protocol – it is often unwise to display or air ones dirty laundry (in my case just plain bad, confused, and poorly constructed writings) in public (or a vault at the bottom of the sea).

I had a short story I wrote for a writing class in college (omg, has it been that long?) and I'm still trying to find it. I got an A on it, but I'm sure it's littered with grammatical and spelling errors and all kinds of stuff that would make me cringe now. But I really would LOVE to read it again.

I found a story on my dad's old computer that I started writing when I was about twelve. I had to cover my eyes at the corny writing and grammatical errors... I was meant to delete it, but I forgot, and now I'm worried that someone in my family read it in the past. How embarrassing.

X

I'll have to search for a short story I wrote in my high school creative writing class. I thought it was brilliant because my heroine was named Forsythia Bush. Gah!

Oh, Z! You've come a long way, but you were a cute baby

law900 said:

The evolution of the writer is never shameful, but often painful. ...after having completed an undergraduate and graduate degree, and writing 3 manuscripts of my own work, I realized one thing – I’m a work in progress. I imagine that in twenty or so years, I will look back at what manuscripts I’ve written and say, “Wow, what a piece of crap – what was I thinking!” ...

Click to expand...

Yeah, I've been known to actually take my entire spiral notebooks out to the barbeque grill, douse them with lighter fluid and watch them burn, they were so bad. I cringe to find anything I wrote in the past. Hopefully, I have improved a little bit...such is my prayer...

shok

Is it bad if the stuff you wrote before is better than the stuff you've written recently?









j/k








I hope.

I wrote a Mary Sue Beatles fanfic that included the ghost of Buddy Holly. Actually, I'm still convinced it was a great story (I loved writing it), though objectively, it must have been absolute shite.