I had initially begun writing a rather large entry about coming back to Bergen after Christmas, being sick, and putting off my 15 minutes per day until I’m at least a little better and I’ve cleaned up this mess a little, but it would have been boring. And look, in one sentence you got all the information anyway. I continued writing about sorting through all my papers (massive cleanup, yay!) and finding old stories, and how I found some background info I presume is for NaNoWriMo 2009, the first year I won, except that I cannot remember that part of the story at all. It’s not really all that strange, since the story was BAD. But at least it’s out of the system now. (ETA: Apparently my memory is worse than I thought. Upon reading the thing more thoroughly I realised that it was actually my novel from NaNoWriMo 2010, which I thought I remembered well enough. Not only that, but he’s one of the main characters, and one of my favourites to boot. That’s how it is when you only use a character’s nickname when talking/thinking about the story, I guess…)

And then. And then I started writing about finding the first draft to the first novel I ever wrote. Sure, I had written small pieces earlier, mostly fan fiction long before I knew what fan fiction was, but this was my first real effort. I remember writing on it everywhere. Before or sometimes in class, at telephone duty in the main building (I went to a boarding school that year and two years after), in my room at night and sometimes in the mornings, everywhere.

I get very sentimental when it comes to this story. Particularly now. The novel I am writing at the moment is actually the same one. The content is very different, although the beginning is very similar. The main characters are the same. The plot is hopefully far better.

By the way, I love reading old stories. Mostly because I can point and laugh at myself. It sounds really bad, I know, but if I’m in one of those moods when I don’t believe in anything I do and believe that I can only write rubbish, nothing is better than reading something really old and really bad. I genuinely believed that these stories were good when I wrote them, so I firmly believe that being able to see how bad they are and seeing exactly what is bad, is proof that I have improved a great deal. So, in essence, it’s proof that I should have a little more faith in myself, backwards as it may seem.

When it comes to the first novel I do get a lot of enjoyment out of it, but it’s also… I don’t laugh as much of it as of other stories. It was the first. It’s something special. It’s handwritten on lined paper, inside a folder which still has the original label on it with my name and class. Inside is the actual notebook in which I wrote half of the draft, marked “First Draft”, my full name, and even “fantasy” (I had only just discovered the genre and was fangirling). It even had some flowers drawin on it. There is also some loose papers on which I wrote the rest. There’s inline notes and marks where I edited it as I went along, and tiny drawings in the margins whenever I got bored. Or whenever I had to stop to think.

Unfortunately that draft was not complete. In the middle of the story I finally got hold of a laptop (my father’s old work laptop, a huge, clunky thing that would dwarf most modern laptops) and wrote the rest of it there. The rest was saved on floppy disks, and while I think I do have the actual disks still, I tried opening them a few years ago when I had access to a floppy drive, and found that the disks had become corrupted over time. At least they were unopenable. A pity, as I would have liked to read the end, and it was never carried over onto my new computers. Since then I always transfer every single story, just because I like to keep everything, and I know I might want to look at them again.

I wanted to translate some of it to English and post it here, but the language is not easily translated (because of word choice and such), so I abandoned that idea. I will say that the beginning was not half bad, although I guess it was coloured by the reading curriculum at school at that time. The plot was absolutely horrible though, I will say that. But plots were never my strong side, I think.

Anyway. I think I’m rambling again. I’ll quit and go sort some more papers, if only because I dumped it all on my bed, and I need to finish if I want to go to sleep tonight…