I wrote what?
I have this whole folder of old Elfquest fic - an actual folder full of typed pages - which I was looking through yesterday. This is not my Tower Mountain stuff. It's my older Daystar stuff, dating roughly from 1981 to 1989-ish. Much of it features a not-so-thinly-disguised version of me as an elf. (Which in itself was fine, since that was the custom in that writing group. I was considered weird in that I had a bunch of additional, not-me characters I was just as interested in.)
Some of it is not bad. Some of it is decidedly meh. The meh-most of the lot that I re-read corresponds to the story Kathy and I co-wrote about our respective characters falling in lurrrve, while we were falling in love in real life. I mean, it's not spork-your-eyes out terrible, but it's a boring story. Editor Barb is muttering "There's no believeable build-up to this at all. Why are these characters getting together, and why should we care? And there's no real conflict here either, and the fake conflict is made up of pointless emo mixed with watered-down versions of every bad relationship cliche ever. Also, anachronistic dialogue everywhere!"
WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I WAS WRITING THIS, EDITOR BARB?
I'm actually kind of horrified by it, in an "I wrote THIS?" way. It's not that I didn't know what made a decent story back then; I think I've improved since, but I wasn't completely clueless. The latest of my Daystar writing was contemporaneous with my first few years in the Tower, where I was writing much better stuff. But in this particular case, I seem to have been utterly blind to the story's myriad flaws. I guess love really does rot your brain. O_o
Rants Talk to me
Some of it is not bad. Some of it is decidedly meh. The meh-most of the lot that I re-read corresponds to the story Kathy and I co-wrote about our respective characters falling in lurrrve, while we were falling in love in real life. I mean, it's not spork-your-eyes out terrible, but it's a boring story. Editor Barb is muttering "There's no believeable build-up to this at all. Why are these characters getting together, and why should we care? And there's no real conflict here either, and the fake conflict is made up of pointless emo mixed with watered-down versions of every bad relationship cliche ever. Also, anachronistic dialogue everywhere!"
WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I WAS WRITING THIS, EDITOR BARB?
I'm actually kind of horrified by it, in an "I wrote THIS?" way. It's not that I didn't know what made a decent story back then; I think I've improved since, but I wasn't completely clueless. The latest of my Daystar writing was contemporaneous with my first few years in the Tower, where I was writing much better stuff. But in this particular case, I seem to have been utterly blind to the story's myriad flaws. I guess love really does rot your brain. O_o
Rants Talk to me