old ghosts

Disabled

There’s something deeply odd about revisiting a text you wrote when you were fifteen, with
an eye toward revising it into something worthy to see the light of day now. (I might have
been sixteen, but I don’t think so. Certainly I was in high school.) It’s not purely
craptastic, though it comes close; large chunks of it are getting deleted without a second
thought. But I had a few worthwhile turns of phrase, buried in amongst the chaff. And the
idea still has some compelling force, which is why I’m revisiting it in the first place.

Should this end up seeing the light of day, it will displace Doppelganger as my
earliest idea to successfully reach print. I can only think of one other thing that stands
even a faint chance of defeating this for that title, and that one thing will be so heavily
modified by the time it does so that it would only barely qualify as the same idea I had when
I was fourteen.

Still. Kee-rist. I was fifteen when I thought this up. If I thought it was weird
admitting I wrote Doppelganger when I was nineteen, this would be substantially
worse.

0 Responses to “old ghosts”

  1. mindstalk

    Have you read Pratchett’s _The Carpet People_. “A collaboration between Terry Pratchett, age 17, and Terry Pratchett, age 41. But, heh heh, I don’t have to pay him any royalties.”

  2. diatryma

    My novelishthing right now started when I was in… junior high? I was young, anyway, and young enough that the first time I picked it up to work on again, I was sixteen or so. The intervening years have done it good, though.

  3. Anonymous

    Good ideas

    Good ideas will always remain good ideas.

    (Sometimes I think I had my best ideas years ago, and the problem with those texts is that I didn’t know yet how to do those ideas justice.)

    C. Rooney

  4. anima_mecanique

    I’ve still got an idea I want to do something with that my friend and I came up with in 8th grade.

    It’s done a lot of time and setting hopping since its inception, but the core idea remains the same.

    Weird, I guess.

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