Photo by Thorin Nielson (check out his Flickr here)
I was cleaning out my USB drives the other day. It's rather tedious work, as it is mostly organizing folders, old school assignments, small text file notes and other random bullshit that tends to accumulate when you are in a hurry or want to write something down on the go. One of my more hated personal traits of mine is that I do tend to be a bit of a hoarder. For some reason known only to my subconscious mind, I tend to hang onto things longer than I should, always out of some irrational fear that I'll need it at a later point, but won't have it. In reality, most of it deserves to be tossed out. Far too often, what sounds good at the time, after it's had the time to percolate and age, really turns out to have been a horrendous notion in the first place. In the end, most of it after review is sent to my electronic dustbin, where it eventually, after a couple of keystrokes, is gone forever, blown into millions of electronic smithereens. In the digital age, deletion tends to be easier, as we lose that physical connection that we have back when people found themselves buried under Andres mountain ranges of tree pulp.
However, upon encountering an older USB drive that I forgotten I had, I was surprised to find out that I unearthed a treasure trove of older .doc files that I had from years ago. This was my old back up of my creative projects, back when I fancied myself as a younger, browner, Stephen King. The amount of stuff on there ran the gamut of literary expression. Old poems, some of which had been finished, but never collected or posted. Various started and aborted short stories, although a few were finished. And, incredibly enough, four projects that I was once very serious about that, but had stopped working on, all far enough along that they weren't ideas or short stories anymore, but full fledged bodies and skeletons of narratives. I suppose the best analogy to describe them would be if you were rebuilding a car, and had managed to get the frame cleaned and straightened out, had the basic guts of the engine installed, as well as some of the necessary components that make a car a car. Granted, it wouldn't get you very far, but at the very least, there was something there that gave you a vague idea of what the car would have looked like when finished, and perhaps even taken you where you wanted to go (like those junk yard cars that exist to solely take you from one car corpse to another.)
They were never finished, and probably weren't anywhere close to being so, but the story concepts were far enough along that each one had sort of undergone a miniature big bang, with universes beginning to form around the central outlines and ideas of the stories. There were characters that had evolved from mere shadows that shuffled in and out of my subconscious, having fully decided to step out into the overcast light that I imagine is what the inside of my mind looks like, to introduce themselves and take part in whatever literary whim I would decide to cast them in. There were four stories that I had managed to get quite a bit of work done.
Why didn't I ever finish?
I suppose, in two cases, real world events came into play that made my once carefully crafted thoughts dated. I had a falling out with Jesse, and tried to continue Battle Royale on my own. Then, The Hunger Games was published, and I knew that, with a similar premise and it's own rising sales numbers, a true tribute to Takami's work would not be possible. As for Like A Song, around the same time as I stopped work on Royale, I discovered the T.V. series Firefly, which more or less covered some of the same concepts that I had been working on in my own work. And so, I discontinued it, fearing being seen as piggybacking off of Joss Wheldon's work (although I do love Firefly, Angel, and Wheldon's work with the Marvel Universe.)
Before I knew it, hours had passed, and it was now early in the morning hours. And that same thought lingered in the air, as sobering and depressing as the smell of a lost love's perfume, enough to bring back some fond, happy memories, but the absence of the person making it all the more apparent that the physical presence is gone.
Why didn't I ever finish?
I knew the answer.
Fear.
Fear of being labeled as being too similar to another writer's work. A fear of being labeled of not being quite good enough. Most importantly, it was a fear that the work that I had put in heart and soul into, spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours working on crafting thousands of different cranial synapses together, and something I had truly cared about and was passionate about, being rejected as not being good enough to share with others. Around 2009, I abandoned any further attempts at a writing career. I felt that I was too old, and that many of the ideas I had written were already now out in the public. I deemed that the stories had been told, in one way or another, and that rather have them suffer the fate of being labeled as unoriginal, and savaged as such, I would just archive them and do nothing.
However, none of it is as bad as I may have thought. Some of it does have some originality, and the narrative is a much different than what I would have thought. I'm thinking of finishing some of it, and rather than submit it to publish, just sharing it here for free. For at my best, even though I have a great number of things I like to dabble in creatively, I'm an daydreamer, and a story teller. Perhaps, just by putting it out there for the general public to read and receive it as they choose to, I'll have achieved both.
They were never finished, and probably weren't anywhere close to being so, but the story concepts were far enough along that each one had sort of undergone a miniature big bang, with universes beginning to form around the central outlines and ideas of the stories. There were characters that had evolved from mere shadows that shuffled in and out of my subconscious, having fully decided to step out into the overcast light that I imagine is what the inside of my mind looks like, to introduce themselves and take part in whatever literary whim I would decide to cast them in. There were four stories that I had managed to get quite a bit of work done.
- Battle Royale - A colaborative effort with Jesse Sanchez, a friend of mine at the time. We had both read and watched the film, Battle Royale, and wanted to create an American version of the film, using the same guidelines as the BR Universe.
- A Walk With Death - A random idea of mine, it would be a collection of stories of people, who, in their last five minutes of life, would have a conversation with Death himself. Not all of them were exactly nice, uplifting stories. Some were quite dark. Really dark.
- A Social Experiment - Another odd title of mine, where I took the concept: what if you took a regular guy, suddenly made him the world's most wanted criminal, and dropped him into a foreign country to survive on his wits alone for three days. I wrote day's one and three on legal paper, with the outlines of day two typed out.
- Like A Song (Working Title) - Like a song was a dystopian/sci-fi novel that I was writing, about an otherwise perfect society that we had in the future, It centered around a young man, a promising cadet for the society's security service/military forces, that wound up joining the rebellion after a great personal loss that occured, as well as how the event was spun. It had giant robots, various tidbits of philosophy that I had learned, most notably Noam Chomsky, as well as my own various theory about religion, mythology, and other things that happened to pop into my head. This was my opus, This work was the most complete, and actually had a book and a half done, as well as some other future sequels finished.
Why didn't I ever finish?
I suppose, in two cases, real world events came into play that made my once carefully crafted thoughts dated. I had a falling out with Jesse, and tried to continue Battle Royale on my own. Then, The Hunger Games was published, and I knew that, with a similar premise and it's own rising sales numbers, a true tribute to Takami's work would not be possible. As for Like A Song, around the same time as I stopped work on Royale, I discovered the T.V. series Firefly, which more or less covered some of the same concepts that I had been working on in my own work. And so, I discontinued it, fearing being seen as piggybacking off of Joss Wheldon's work (although I do love Firefly, Angel, and Wheldon's work with the Marvel Universe.)
Before I knew it, hours had passed, and it was now early in the morning hours. And that same thought lingered in the air, as sobering and depressing as the smell of a lost love's perfume, enough to bring back some fond, happy memories, but the absence of the person making it all the more apparent that the physical presence is gone.
Why didn't I ever finish?
I knew the answer.
Fear.
Fear of being labeled as being too similar to another writer's work. A fear of being labeled of not being quite good enough. Most importantly, it was a fear that the work that I had put in heart and soul into, spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours working on crafting thousands of different cranial synapses together, and something I had truly cared about and was passionate about, being rejected as not being good enough to share with others. Around 2009, I abandoned any further attempts at a writing career. I felt that I was too old, and that many of the ideas I had written were already now out in the public. I deemed that the stories had been told, in one way or another, and that rather have them suffer the fate of being labeled as unoriginal, and savaged as such, I would just archive them and do nothing.
However, none of it is as bad as I may have thought. Some of it does have some originality, and the narrative is a much different than what I would have thought. I'm thinking of finishing some of it, and rather than submit it to publish, just sharing it here for free. For at my best, even though I have a great number of things I like to dabble in creatively, I'm an daydreamer, and a story teller. Perhaps, just by putting it out there for the general public to read and receive it as they choose to, I'll have achieved both.
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