#and then I would've gotten an insane amount of backlash

[friendofthecrows]

Rereading some of my old work because I've felt Uninspired lately and I thought it might help to examine what made some of my favorite stories fun to write and what is not working about them currently so that I end up with a good mix of old things to revive and new directions to explore.

I intended to just examine a few projects, but I ended up looking through my entire "books" folder which has been moved from laptop to laptop since 2015 and added to over that entire timespan. I was 14 in 2015 and started my first typed (rather than handwritten) WIP on my old-old computer (at the time new) while waiting for the bell on the first day of 10th grade. So there is some questionable writing in there. I didn't use the carriage return ever, and that was the least of my sins. For example, in the first paragraph of the work I've just gotten re-obsessed with, I initially used "strange" to describe something twice within two sentences of each other to avoid actually describing it. Pathetic.

But I am REALLY remembering how much I love these characters and even, yes, some elements of the plot. Kind of impressed with my 14-year-old self although the sentence-level craft just sucks. There is also absolutely no market for this because it is distinctly YA yet deals with topics that people are excruciatingly determined to prevent kids from reading (even more so than in 2015, when I wrote it, as a kid). Sorry that they're gay and do unspeakable things, I guess. (It's more the unspeakable things than the homosexuality.) Ageing them up would fundamentally change the story but I'm considering it. It does start really mild so I might feel bad if some kid started reading it because of the lighthearted sci-fi fantasy adventure and ended up with something that would need significantly more content warnings than Hatoful Boyfriend. I guess 14-year-old me really just went, "Let's boil this frog into a psychological horror."