My current (and first) book is in editing right now (thanks, FirstEditing) and I am really excited for it to come back to me so I can move on to the next step. For now though, I am working on my second book, which is actually really my first book.
Let me explain. When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a novel called the Quest for the Crystal Sword. We had creative writing assignments and I thought I would take it just a little further than the assignment asked. I wrote about 30 pages (all printed out on a dot matrix printer…awesome). My best friend, Chris, also was writing a novel (I don’t know which of us came up with the idea first), and his was entitled The Crystal. You can see we were not afraid of plagiarism at the age of eight.
Anyway, I started on that book, I wrote all those pages, and then I set it aside for the next, oh, about, 20 years or so. I started working on it again a few years ago. Needless to say, in that time I had changed a lot. A lot. And when I picked it up to work on it again, I think I kept only two things from the original: the opening line of Chapter 1 (which is now Chapter 2); and the name of the main character. As for the rest, it sounded amazing to a fourth grader, but not so much for a guy in his mid-30s.
It was both interesting and cringe-inducing to go back and read that original manuscript. At the same time, though, it was pretty cool. I have often wondered what my life would be if I had kept at that as an eight-year-old. Would I have beat Christopher Paolini as the most successful youth fantasy author (answer: unlikely…even more realistic answer: no)? But I might not be an engineer today, and I might be wondering what it would be like to NOT be an author, rather than the other way around.
Who knows, of course. That’s one of the truths of life: you never know what ‘might have been.’
