Step 49: Confess (Day 2)

I just got word that an illustration project I've been working so hard on has had its original February 17th deadline pushed back to June. What a relief!

I'M FREEEEEE for now

Which means I can blog without feeling guilty for wasting time hahaha. Onward to Day 2 of #authorconfession:

What is the WORST thing you have written?

Since this is #authorconfession, I confess: A fanfiction.net account I created in 2001 is still in existence to this day. And before you ask, the answer is: No, I will never tell you what the account name is. I'm taking that shit with me to the grave. It's filled with a handful of Star Wars Expanded Universe fanfiction focusing on my favorite EU characters (Jaina Solo and Wedge Antilles) and one mushy Rurouni Kenshin fic. If you want to do the digging yourself and see just how bad of a writer I was as recently as 2008, by all means, go for it. But to quote the great Jedi Master Yoda: "If into the [depths of Shea's fanfiction.net account] you go, only pain will you find."

And that's not even the worst fanfiction I've ever written. When I first got into the Star Wars EU back in 1997, I used to write scenes featuring Jaina Solo by hand in the back pages of my notebook during class, and I'm sure I still have them laying around in a storage box somewhere because I'm a hoarder and can't bring myself to throw anything away no matter how awful it is. I'll give myself a pass on those ones, though, on account of my being 12 years old at the time.

Looking back, some of my writing at the height of my fanfiction.net days still retains some of its charm. I made a ton of rookie mistakes, to be sure--purple prose, beat tags with EVERY line of dialogue, repetitive adjective use (seriously how did I not know of the existence of a freaking thesaurus)--but I can see the influence of my favorite author, Aaron Allston, in those early works that I still carry with me in my writing to this day.

I also drew copious amounts of bad fan art, but that's another beast entirely.

On a more recent note, I was digging through my hard drive in search of who-the-fuck-knows-what and I stumbled upon my very first draft of my current WIP. NGL, I almost died of secondhand embarrassment reading just a few short paragraphs, and I cringe just thinking about the wannabe author I was trying to portray myself as in that early draft. Thankfully, I've improved in leaps and bounds in just a few short years I think, but it's humbling to recall just how awful a writer I was not even that long ago.

All I gotta say is, thank GOD for beta readers.