You bring me that sad little bag of cassettes

Warning: juvenilia ahoy.

Ten years ago, I discovered a cache of printouts of unfinished middle and high school stories. Re-reading them was an amazing refresher course on the state of my id aged twelve to sixteen. I didn't think any of them existed in electronic form anymore, at least not on a machine I had access to; I didn't get a computer of my own until I left for college.

I just found one on my hard drive. I can't be sure it's the same version as the printout, but it is definitely the same story: I described it to nineweaving as "the purest high school Babylon 5/I, Claudius juvenilia imaginable." Like, there are some lines in here I am letting stand for the sake of the historical record, but I was barely bothering to file the serial numbers off. Looking at it by daylight, there may be some badly ripped-off McKillip or Hodgell in here as well. From source materials, my best guess for my age at the time is sixteen. It's all fragments of scenes. I have no idea how it was supposed to end. I had no style to speak of; I had not yet figured out how to create convincing fictional names, never mind governmental systems; I really wanted to write emotionally-politically complex science fantasy and I had no talent for any of these attributes. I wrote a story when I was thirteen that is much, much better. I still think it's neat that this one survives. It was very obviously written by me.

( The revolutionaries marched through the capital on the first day of the new year. )

What's really interesting to me all these years later is not just that I can see what went into this story (because it's screaming at me), but that I can see in my published fiction since some of the same ideas or emotions I was trying to get at with these fragments. I wasn't conscious of revisiting anything. I managed to forget twice in twenty years that this file even existed. Some part of my brain just kept trying to get something tricky right. Spoiler: it wasn't the complex science fantasy politics. But I think "The Boatman's Cure" has a lot more to do with these idtastic eight thousand words than I would have said if you'd asked me a week ago.