OldShame

Do you have one?

The first version of my first book had about 100 less pages. The central idea was good, but that was the problem: it was too good for my own writing skills at the time.

In the end, everything was ridiculously easy. There's a particular situation where the protagonist spends several hours pushing his mind to its limits, almost going insane and spending more effort than he had ever managed in his entire life in order to obtain a certain notion that is virtually impossible for anyone to learn. Nowadays, it takes over 10 pages for him to achieve this (not counting the whole book until that point, in which he was still trying to discover this thing but not with the same intensity). In the first version, it took him ONE PARAGRAPH.

It was also filled with childish, nonsensical conversations and weird unexplained coincidences thrown for no good reason. A few months ago, I was checking my e-mail and found this old version of the book and downloaded it. Reading it really made me cringe, and I renamed it "ROFL.doc". Thank God nobody else read it.

edited 16th Sep '11 3:37:50 PM by Teraus

"You cannot judge a system if your judgement is determined by the system."

Help Needed Series

A good 140K+ word pile of crap that I recently went back and read over. I hate my writing. All of it.

Well, the re-writes are a little better, at least.

No one believes me when I say angels can turn their panties into guns.

An extremely early version of my Cyberpunk story had the protagonist as a very Mary-Sueish Cyborg version of Simon Templar and was so cringe-worthy I suspect it's still the cause of some of my nightmares.

The character and world underwent a large number of revisions and the current version is a bodyguard who limits any lawlessness to minor things:

Police Constable Michael Cummins: "Is that a mobile phone jammer?"

Wolfgang: "Of course not, that would be illegal."

He's using it to block a suspected remote kill circuit and hopefully save a life, the cop is quite aware of what it is and why it's being used and they're being "playful" - quite a change from the "just you prove it was me that killed those criminals last night" exchanges in the original draft.

There are still things about the character I'm not happy with and further revisions are required but it's nowhere near as horrific as before.

My last tv tropes contest entry was pretty bad.Too much angst and poor character development.

I want to redeem myself this time.

edited 16th Sep '11 5:14:45 PM by FallenLegend

Make your hearth shine through the darkest night; let it transform hate into kindness, evil into justice, and loneliness into love.

Didn't we have this thread more than once?

On the shelf next to me alone, in rough chronological order: A realistic fiction short story for school, a Dungeons And Dragons based story (it has Cathy in it), a steampunk one, a boarding school fantasy one, a second attempt of the D&D story, etc.

Special Mention: Kira Is Justice. After that died, my self-awareness of my writing sparked.

Well, my original sets of ideas for the comic book concept Knightfall were full of near-irredeemable sues and forumliac plots, both internally (i.e. each story resembled each other) and externally (as well as other stories already written).

I've reformed it enough (I chose to deconstruct the very concept of a Mary Sue in-universe, and condensed 6 stories into 4, which allowed them to be more varied as individual plots) that I'm willing to use it as partial backstory for an unrelated story I'm doing now, so it's not a total loss...

Oh, and all the fanfiction I wrote during my (short) time at FF.Net. All of it.

I am now known as Flyboy.

Do I have an Old Shame? Most certainly. (Actually, there was more than one, really). However, unlike the rest of you, I have no interest in exhibiting it here or anywhere else. That's why it's an Old Shame.

And chihuahua is right - this thread exists somewhere already.

edited 16th Sep '11 5:51:11 PM by nrjxll

The first version of Wordkeepers, which was not only exceedingly long, but also non-stop drama oh my god. Seriously, it was angst angst angst ANGST. And then a little bit of whining. It did have some good jokes, though... And oddly, I feel that my younger self, despite being much worse about rambling fluff, was better at making sentences flow a bit more naturally.

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

However, I feel like my younger self drew too much from inspirations, and back then, my pool of inspirations was too small. I know better know to brew my own stuff, but my first completed short story rips off people from real life.

My guess is because angst is dramatic, and to them, dramatic is good. However, there's a difference between drama and melodrama that younger writers tend to not be able to distinguish.

I think I didn't encounter that problem also. Perhaps because I never reach the point that I had to write an angsty situation. Also, I had my writer's awakening before high school.

edited 16th Sep '11 6:01:54 PM by chihuahua0

What the heck is it with new writers and angst anyway? That certainly was never an issue for me, at least.

edited 16th Sep '11 5:58:03 PM by nrjxll

My first novel, when I was thirteen (fifteen now), was, to put it simply, a huge rip-off of Bleach.

It didn't help that I was a huge Weeaboo at the time...>_>

edited 16th Sep '11 6:16:45 PM by Masterofchaos

Luckily it was never committed to electrons; it remains buried in some long-lost spiral-bound notebook from sixth grade.

It was a horrible ripoff of both Animorphs and Captain Planet, and that's all I'm going to say about it. The basic concepts and some of the characters are currently slated to go into a certain future project, one with some actual world building and plot behind it.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

There's been stuff I don't think I executed very well, but I still think my early ideas were sound. (Even the half-alien warrior with red eyes got himself killed due to his own faults.)

edited 16th Sep '11 10:21:21 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

First New Dawn, a pop culture reference laden mess of a story inspired by Gone, Power Rangers, etc. Had a mind numbingly stupid series of events in the last book.

That first series of books before New Dawn. Half of them are incomplete, the other half are filled with the exploits of a Marty Stu hero that just. won't. die. Oh yes, and a random banker is introduced in one book as a bad guy because he wants the MacGuffin for profits. No reason is ever given for this, and he is killed fifteen pages later.

Certainly. A large scale story revolving around people with psychokinetic abilities and a not so invisible war being orchestrated by gods and one particularly saavy madman. It was a rather good idea, with some entertaining characters and a fair amount of plot that ran parallel to Norse mythology (of course this was a plot point silly), but with ploor execution (too much fighting and super dickwaving, extremely cliched and plot convenient amnesia, frequent sidetracks from the main story in the form of numerous Adventure Towns, not to mention the itching notion I get every once and a while that my protagonist may have edged into God-Mode Sue territory by the end. Oh, and it was called Psych-0. Really me?). And this was without even having put it down on paper.

I'd like to think I've improved, but my self-deprecating inner Attention Whore refuses to let anyone but my critics decide that

edited 17th Sep '11 12:34:55 AM by KSPAM

I've got new mythological machinery, and very handsome supernatural scenery. Goodfae: a mafia web serial

Okay, that one made me laugh.

I'd like to say that I think there's a difference between "poor-quality old work" and Old Shame. For instance, I've made occasional references on here to my one and only venture into the world of fanfiction - a Harry Potter parody. I certainly do not consider it a good work, burdened as it is by Shallow Parody, Random Events Plot, and in general just not being terribly funny. But it has some parts I still think I did well, and I consider it a valuable learning experience in a positive sense. It's not an Old Shame.

In contrast, the two works that I actually do view as Old Shames have no redeeming value other then teaching me how and what not to write. While I can still read the aforementioned Harry Potter parody today, I have no intention of doing the same with my Old Shame works. In fact, the only reason I haven't destroyed them outright is because I tend to disapprove of that sort of thing on principle, not because I see any use to keeping them around.

I still have very early drafts of my Cyberpunk story around, too, for precisely the same reason. I'm just not inclined to destroy anything, even though I do think it's unmitigated crap and I have no desire to reread any of it lest I get the urge to drag myself around the back of the house and give myself a damned good kicking for writing it.

, And those Old Shames I mentioned that are on my shelf are there for a reason also. It's mostly so I can re-use them one day, though.

I have several Old Shames. The first several had Akiko as a very Mary-Sue-ish character who underwent lots and lots of angst, most of it for no apparent reason. I swear I wrote down a short summary of all of OneTrackMinds previous incarnations somewhere in a thread... Let me see if I can find it, and save myself some time (maybe.)

...And I can't find it. Oh, well. Anyway, OneTrackMind has had a lot of previous incarnations, and two (or was it three...?) spiritual ancestors and/or precursors. One of which I still keep around, for the same reasons others have said: I find it painfully funny, and, actually, I think that my general ideas were sound, but my writing sucked and the "Akiko" there was still a Mary Sue. Here they are, in order:

• Blank: Imaginatively titled, it was written when I was twelve. The...thing spanned about three chapters up until deletion, and was utterly awful. The main character was an Eldritch Abomination mashup of various characteristics of different fandoms, including but not limited to: Inuyasha, Naruto, Duel Masters, Pokemon, Yu Yu Hakusho, YuGiOh, and various other ones - basically, whatever I was interested in at the time. The main character was a Mary Sue Classic, who was horribly scarred, and was (for inexplicable reasons) an assassin, who was also secretly a demon with summoning powers...or something. There was also, um, Gratuitous Rape and mangling of the English language solely because I thought that that's how fanfiction was "supposed to be written." I have done my damnedest to forget this horrible thing, but occasionally I have nightmares with scenes from it.

• Mononoke no Kaze, Version 1: This was a rewrite of the fic from above, done when I was 14, which, when I spent too much time posting it on a forum instead of doing other things, got me in quite a bit of trouble. This is where "Akiko" first showed up, and, erm, was still a Mary Sue. Still had lots of uncomfortable Gratuitous Rape, and just general bad writing. Very bad writing. It was inspired by an Inu Yasha fanfiction (that I can't find anymore) called To Love A Demon. Aside from some spelling errors, the fic actually wasn't that bad. But this one doesn't bear remembering, either.

• Mononoke no Kaze, Version 2: This was a rewrite of the above, and actually had some semblance of a plot. I was still 14 when I wrote this. It dropped the '30 Fandom Mashup' element, and switched to being a Naruto-Inuyasha Crossover Fic, for which I actually did do (at that time) what I considered to be a fair amount of research into both series. It lasted for four chapters on a website until I stopped writing it (because I realized how bad it was, and that I couldn't write). I still have it around, I've kept a link here somewhere... Ah, here it is! http://fan-fi.blogspot.com/2007_11_14_archive.html Feel free to mock it as mercilessly as I have; I hope it gives you a good laugh. It serves as a good reminder of how nieve I was then.

• Wan-Patan, or "One-Track Mind": Written at about 14-15 years old. It featured a slightly altered version of the Akiko from Mn K 2 in a modern setting. It didn't last long, and, looking back, it was very strange. It is, however, where I started to get some of my ideas for the final version, as well as the title. I'm glad this incarnation died quickly.

• One-Track Mind, Version 1: I still have the first chapter of this up on fanfiction.net, actually. Starring, yet again, Akiko, it was an OC-centered fic that didn't make much sense, and I later realized, couldn't work out the way I had planned it. I'm still kind of fond of it, in a way. A character profile for Akiko, blending elements from Mn K 1, with my ideas from the time, can be found in this thread, at post #5. Though I clearly saw its flaws, I'm still kind of fond of it, I suppose, like an old toy.

• One-Track Mind, Version 2: I scrapped much of my ideas and characterization from the previous version and started from scratch. I retooled the plot some, but it never got off the ground. Written from ages 15-16. I hung on to it until relatively recently, when it got deleted by accident. It was, however, bad, and still Akiko-centric.

After that, you have OneTrack Mind, the (finally) final version.

I look back on my Old Shames with a mixture of wonder, disgust, and sadness. It's kind of hard to describe.

Everything I ever wrote up until a couple years ago, and then every idea I ever discarded since.

I have a whole book of Old Shame.

As in published.

Don't look for it. Please.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

Great, now I want to read it...

No one believes me when I say angels can turn their panties into guns.

In as few words as possible: Student work. Purple Prose abides and abounds.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

Oh, and to make matters worse, I had recently discovered sex while writing the last prequel book. Actually just found this gem again.

The result? A Purple Prose laden tryst between Michael and...his Opposite-Sex Clone. I had forgotten she was the opposite gender clone while writing it. And then randomly the other love interest joins in for no reason. She had previously been revealed to be a cat girl, only to not be a cat girl randomly. Did I mention all of this was happening on a supposedly badly damaged, falling DRA battleship? The second love interest having been badly injured and then just magically having been healed?

Damn I failed pretty bad.

edited 19th Sep '11 9:20:53 PM by NickTheSwing

Crappy old Battle Tech/Robotech crossover. Looking back, though, it had some good moments and some good ideas.

Then there was the Dork Age which was "what is this I don't even" and will not speak of.

Nous restons ici.