Starting with Camp NaNo, this month got off to a roaring hello. Thorndale part two is well underway and doing fine! However, I stalled out in the middle of the month--not from "writer's block," but rather family matters.
Gathering together to clear out an overdue storage unit, the reunion's end felt more like an estate sale. I dropped my schedule in the wake of such a feeling and focused on the items pulled from the cover of dust. In it, scattered among half the boxes and piles, barely taped, yet aptly coated in the filth of neglect were things each of us had believed to be lost. For myself, the most dear is my first novel. The first one that I dared to complete, I should say.
It is what I consider a fan-fiction nightmare . . . not of sci-fi show or fanciful cartoon or superhero rage from TV/Screen, even a book's characters', but of another outlet just the same. Fan-fic, being that I was a fan. Sadly--admittedly--I cannot bear to watch it anymore. That being said, the fascination still heralds a time, rather phase in life, and one which I devoted so much of myself to complete.
In the last week, I have kept the first notebook of the work close, and the last few pages of the book loose-leafed in a binder on my desk. Before me, I splayed the pages of an unfinished print out of what I had attempted to type up on an old word processor (also found in time's mire, though the disks have been lost--what little was found, I dare think to be corrupted, but will still try at a later date).
I truly believe that we, as writers, tend our ideas and grown them in different ways. In a time where I craved to write, but lacked feasible content, back in August or 1998, I sat in the front row of a college math class and dabbled with a few 'characters' of which I adored from fandom. I even scribbled across their names so that I may write in piece from passing glances. My instructor thought I kept impeccable notes (as my grade was good), but, oh, little did they know! Ha, ha, ha. It was merely writer's fancy; not a love of numbers.
Back then, when ideas were fledgling specters on the wind, I wrote my story out in play/script format--though I left out the Scene locales and used hyphens instead of parentheses for action/notes. Descriptive narrative was too steep a task. But, this allowed for growth of an idea and the pages numbering 1-14, soon numbered into the 500s by April the following year--and my goal of writing a novel was now manageable feat. I did not consider this work a novel for years . . . decades. It was born from fandom infatuation and not in prose as we all see literary works to be. So, I believed myself a fool and, over time, this novel lost . . .
Numerous boxes later, a week of inhaling dust, brushing off dead spiders, one mummified rat, and shooing countless, resilient, stinkbugs (they survive bug bombs, just so you know), remorse of a lost work culminated to rekindled nostalgia last night. At the bottom of a box I was sifting, and beginning to deem trash, lay the missing five notebooks of a dream I had made flesh all those years before. In February of 1999, I had set down, oblivious to all life but an idea, and rewrote the pieces of a broken story into a completed manuscript (script being the operative word, here). I slept 1.5-3 hours a day, ate nearly never, and, eight weeks later, had turned eight drafts into a cohesive work. To this day, my heart and soul lay on those pages. And it is truly a spiritual experience to visit them again.
So much so that returning to Thorndale after such a reading of the past (and playing old cassettes from those same months or far, far beyond them--talking mix tapes from '88 here) has seemed to be a returning from a pilgrimage.
The untitled work will be retyped, as it lays inked in code (those lovely blocks for spaces and special characters no computer or human can pronounce, between each words, and some letters. I have 215 pages of this which I have read this week. highlighters work great in separating the line contents from the blocked interaction--like picking apart the Borg cube). However, at a later date as well.
This past week has been a greatly awakening experience, one which has restored a deeply confused heart.
~ See you on the bookshelves!
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