It’s safe to say I haven’t written a proper story in many years.
Next year it’s probably been close to a decade when I finished the last NaNoWriMo edition I participated in where I wrote a sci-fi story about a bunch of revolutionaries set in the 2080’s (the distant future… after a major historical divergence in the early 2000’s in-universe). Yes, I wrote that manuscript in 2014.
Like my other NaNoWriMo manuscripts, I was both stunned by how simultaneously good and bad these are. I was re-reading the introductory chapter for three of my most important manuscripts, and I really liked what I was reading.
I could tell that there was a lot that needed to be fixed, but I’m pretty enthused about what was there. I won’t forget good ol’ Hemingway: The first draft of anything is shit.
Some of these manuscripts1 are over a decade old, and it’s kind of interesting how some of the sci-fi has aged (probably for the worse).
One of the stories is a historically inspired, set around the time of Emperor Augustus, a tale that tells the story of Roman soldiers that end up in a fantastical world. This is the story that I want to tell the most, and that’s the tale that I’ve been re-reading (and I’ve been extensively editing the first two chapters).
I probably have a lot of rewriting to do, but I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got here. I’ve recently been inspired by the output of Brandon Sanderson and I really think that while I am nothing more than the most amateur of writers, I can have a lot of fun writing that story that I know I have inside me and have been waiting to write for some time now.
So I shall. I probably won’t do another NaNo, but I suspect I will be doing some writing throughout the year.
Not actually manuscripts, but rather Scrivener project files. I love Scrivener, it’s so good. It was actually a fun experience to open up these original files and still have the amazing software to open them. ↩