I told you the shower was a dangerous, dangerous place for me to be.

Yup. Today, while scrubbing off the accumulated dirt of a day spent sitting in my room thinking Evil SchuKen Thoughts of Extreme and Potent Evilness, I found myself thinking about my stories. No. Not my fanfiction. My old stories. The original fiction I tried writing with a young man who shall be referred to only as my co-culprit. He knows who he is... not that he knows I have a Livejournal.

Yup, I wrote stories. Not that I ever finished any of them. My co-culprit and I wrote screeds of this shit. We had folders full of artwork, discs full of story outlines and scripts - the plan was that these were supposed to be comics, but the designated artist (um, that would have been me) wasn't particularly good at drawing so that never got off the ground - huge pieces of paper covered in webs of character names and interactions. We really didn't have anything better to do, it was marginally innocent fun and hey, even if I didn't realize that was what I was doing, it taught me a lot about character creation, story structure and plots... even if said learning was largely of the 'whoa, I'll never do that again!' school.

Oh, I was one fucked-up, scarily dreamy little girl. No wonder I never got on with my classmates.

And, because I'm in that kind of mood, I decided to sit down and think about these old stories. Or, more precisely, about why they didn't work. What went wrong? Why were they such abortions of ideas?

Note - a lot of the character names will look familiar. Very. That's because these stories were created, for the most part, in the mid '90s when internet access was rather more difficult to come by, Google was yet to be set up and Wikipedia was but a pipe dream, and the only way a lot of fankiddies out there could get Japanese names was to rip them wholesale from the manga they read.

Some of these stories also had irritating fanbrat Japanese names courtesy of my co-culprit, who thought he could speak it and couldn't. I've translated those into English because, let's be fair here, they were crap. Well, I can't say that wasn't apt...

( Attempts at Stories )
( Abortive Ideas )

What a filler! I knew this stuff would come in useful some day.

No wonder my adolescence was so annoyingly blameless when I spent most of it buried under screeds of paper writing hellishly crappy 'original fiction' until my head exploded with sheer idiocy. I've still got some of this stuff on my hard drive. I've still got some of the folders with this stuff in at home. Most of it I tried to throw out, though, and when my co-culprit wouldn't let me I told him he could keep them, because I certainly didn't want to.

I don't know why I bother remembering all this junk. Most of it's completely useless. Oh well, it's there for better or worse. And hey, it could have been worse. I could have written Demon Angelic. There is always a bright side!

By the way - has anyone heard from kay_cricketed lately?

Kay's fallen off the face of the planet again and damn but this place isn't the same without her. Not least of which because people keep talking about Naruto and I want to ask her what all the fuss is about and what in Hell it all means. She writes the fic and she thinks Sasuke is pretty, so she seems like a good person to ask... if I can find her, of course. Your people need you, Kay, and a plague shall be on all our houses until you have returned to the fold!