OldShame

His giant robot has two attacks:

1) throw Throwing Stars at opponents...except they're shaped like swastikas.

2) shoot a beam at the opponent...shaped like a swastika.

Oh, and Dr. Deathsatan gives this wonderful line when he betrays the UN, "Rot, Rot George W Bush, Rot in your regret. For it was George W Bush's America that aided the rise of Doctor Deathsatan!!!"

Universally omnisexual, highly promiscuous and invariably attractive elves with STD Immunity and control over their reproductive systems. That is all I have to say on the topic of Old Shames.

edited 14th May '12 6:07:14 PM by KillerClowns

If no children were involved and it was porn, that's totally ok.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

It was only a year ago, and I never actually published it anywhere, but I wrote this script for a web series about costumed crime bosses. It was bad. Really bad.

"They shoot at each other until the thug is dead."

For comparison, an excerpt from my work-in-progress Batman script:

"BATMAN kicks behind the LEAD THUG's knee, causing the LEAD THUG to fall to his knees. BATMAN follows this up with a close-fisted backhand, knocking the LEAD THUG unconscious."

edited 29th May '12 8:18:47 PM by DirectorCannon

"Urge to thump... rising." -Fighteer

Elves. Why did it have to be elves.

Seriously, everything else in there is blatant but grokkable wish-fulfillment. But making them elves on top of everything else really pushes it into a new level of mockery that I find puzzling.

It could have been worse. It could have involved dragons.

edited 29th May '12 9:41:55 PM by dRoy

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

I honestly don't think that would make it worse. Kinkier, maybe, but not worse.

Hoo boy, where to start. I've been a lot more prolific than I thought, if only in bits and pieces.

---

• The first thing I remember truly writing was a play called There Must Be Something Going Around, which I made at age 9. It starts off with a bunch of characters exchanging dialogue about pretending to be blind, borrowing a grandmother's seeing-eye dog, and name-dropping a "Boulderdash" clone I used to play. The next part takes place at an apartment complex near me, then transitions to a nearby outlet mall, and finally a Super 8 Motel that we used to stay at on Labor Day weekends. And at no point is there anything resembling plot. It's really dumb, but I keep it because it has a lot of unintentional humor, and it reminds me of how spirited I used to be.

• A few short stories I wrote at a writing camp when I was 11. One was an observational piece (sitting by the lake vs. sitting in the computer lab); one was a poem I wrote about Beanie Babies; one was a Dream Within a Dream where everywhere the guy goes, he sees "Future site of [business]" signs; and I think one had a hamster using his wheel to play Wheel Of Fortune and a parrot using a computer.

• A comic book about a cat named Cool Cat, whose fur was tie-dye. It had a b-side comic about an ant who called a mouse a "pip of a squeaker" before they beat each other up. I ran out of material halfway through and wrote only one word each on the last 8 pages.

• A gathering of stuff I wrote around age 13:
  • Some short "humor" pieces, inspired by a friend of my mom's who was an amateur humor writer himself. Things I remember were:
    • A short piece on farts (inspired by said friend's story on the "crack problem" in America; i.e., plumber's crack)
    • A "comparison" of the men's and women's bathrooms at school (portraying the former as a grubby hellhole, and the latter as utopia)
    • A parody of the "Ask Ashley" segments on All That, in which the questions grow increasingly stupid, and Ashley's answers increasingly profane (but in Symbol Swearing since I was afraid to swear until much later, due to my mom hating it). Come to think of it, this one wasn't too bad.
  • An angsty thing called "The Store That Was", about a fictional grocery store being torn down; the site is just a slab of concrete, the narrator's sad and reminiscing on the automatic doors, the water fountain, the deli, etc., and the owner's now this scraggly guy who hangs out in a bar. I later tacked on an All Just a Dream ending because I thought it was too angsty.
  • Some more short pieces here and there. I remember one angsty piece I barely even started about a teenaged rape victim, and how her rapist was now at a prison near me. This and "The Store That Was" were my only two angst pieces that I recall.

Luckily for me, all the angsty stuff was on an ancient Mac whose hard drive died ages ago, although I think I still have most of that printed out somewhere.

• An unfinished Harry Potter fanfic I did when I was about 14. I got as far as vomiting on Nearly Headless Nick because I found the nearly-headlessness gross; picking up Harry, Hagrid, Hermione and Ron at a local airport, then eating at Burger King; then complaining about a nearby exit that I think needs rebuilding. On one page, I go into unnecessary detail on what's in a nearby town, and then say that Harry thinks traffic lights are magic because he's never seen them before. I think I stopped because I wrote myself into a corner. I keep this one in my desk.

• A fantasy story in which a character goes into a cave and finds an "otterpuss", an otter/octopus hybrid I blatantly stole from Jonathan Rand's Michigan Chillers. I don't think I ever finished it.

To this day, that's still the only fanfic I've tried. I don't know if I could ever do fanfic, since I'm not really a fan of any series that I think would be fanfic worthy, except maybe the Sonic comics.

• And stretching the definition a bit, I did some comics and furry art from about the time I was 14 to 18:
  • My very first was a nonanthro character I did called a "felamagriff" (cat + llama + gryphon; I was really into llamas because of The Emperors New Groove) who lived in a dungeon and was supposed to represent me. He didn't last long.
  • A few more furry characters, including an otter whose name was @ (yes, his name was an at sign). He was also supposed to represent me in a comic called Work in Progress, which also had a goth canid and a female mouse who was basically a gender-flip of Marsupilami, long tail and all.
  • @ eventually evolved into a fox-dragon named Kent, then a blue ferret named Cleveland.
  • Later, I had a cast of characters built up (fox, beaver, ferret, kangaroo, hyena), and made some half-hearted attempts at building a comic around them. If I remember correctly, they were a band who lived in a former Montgomery Ward. Some days I would get a one-page comic drawn around them, but most days I just drew a new character. I must've had 30 of them at one point.
  • Eventually I just kept creating new furry characters every time I drew, with no real focus or purpose. Over time, more and more of them became zany Mix-and-Match Critters that looked like I threw all the Wuzzles into a blender. Among the ones I remember were flying squirrel/beaver; another fox/dragon who was female; an otterpuss (what can I say, I liked the idea); and a mongoose/snake who was basically designed like a naga.
  • And finally, the aforementioned @ character evolved again into another otter who stole the kangaroo character and took her as a spouse. (I still keep these characters since I kind of like them, but I don't draw them anymore.) I did some silly stuff with them for a while — tried to build a backstory for them, did up a family tree, wrote a little bit of meta humor, and came up with some borderline-foot-fetish gags that I never completed because I didn't know how to draw them.
  • I think the only writing I did with my furry characters that wasn't a comic was a short story about the otter and kangaroo discovering a hedgehog-vixen who makes special tea with healing powers. That was the whole plot.

Ultimately I gave up on trying to draw furries, since I felt that I wasn't improving nearly as much as my friends who had started drawing around the same time.

---

I didn't do a lot of serious novel-type reading growing up, so I didn't have a lot of inspiration to draw from — between that and my Asperger's, most of what I wrote was really nonsensical, stilted and devoid of plot. My reading material at the time was mostly newspaper comics, Dave Barry columns, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, and Wayside School. I only did the Harry Potter thing for a few months and quickly gave up because I realized I just wasn't getting anything out of it.

---

I don't think I made any serious attempts at writing and drawing again until just recently. I have a billion ideas in my head, but I think I lack the talent to execute any. Among other things, I'm trying to start a furry webcomic. I also want to do something with furries in space!!; a children's or young-adult fantasy/adventure book with animal characters; a crime/murder mystery parody with nonsensical evidence; et cetera.

Much to my surprise, one of my old furry drawings from 2002 looks to be a beta version of Jillian, one of the characters from my webcomic idea.

everything I have written so far

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

No children, but heaven have mercy, I started this project with serious intent. Which is somehow more shameful than all the rest.

For this sort of absurd wish fulfillment in a non-sci-fi setting? It's always elves, mate. Always elves. Y'know, to explain the bizarrely convenient biology.

Least one good thing came out of the ridiculous project, though. Ended up toying with deconstructing the whole shebang when I realized how terrible it was. I was feeling kind of lazy, though, so I just sort of whipped together a Laughably Evil trio of Villain Protagonists by picking the best villainous character ideas I had from abandoned projects to tear the so-called utopia apart for fun and profit. Grabbed a psychotic christmas elf turned assassin from one of my sillier daydreams, a wise-cracking scientist from an adventure game idea I'd had, and the final boss from another video game idea I'd briefly toyed with. Project as a whole ended up scrapped, but the trio, in very heavily modified form, went on to bigger and better things.

edited 29th May '12 10:58:27 PM by KillerClowns

That's actually why I brought it up - see, everything else in there is understandable from the point of view of someone after self-wish fulfillment. But making these... beings elves doesn't really add anything except that added touch of Mary Sue-ness.

All I remember about my writing before upper secondary school is that it was horribly gimmicky. I was a clever thing, and I know I was called obnoxious for my behaviour too, and as naturally follows, with a decent grasp of the theory of writing but no deeper understanding or experience in its practice, my texts were... just filled to brim with gimmicks.

The only exception to this was my fanfic effort when I was 14 and didn't know what fanfiction even was. For the first time in life I experienced true inspiration, and for the rush and overwhelmingness of it, I could also swear it was my actual first love as well. I woke up at 4 AM to sneak past my parents downstairs to type. I produced tens of pages. I needed to get it out.

And of course it was godawful! :D

My heroine was a true Mary Sue, a self-insert who looked like how I wished I would be seen like once I grew up a bit, and had my family and my nature down to the last little insecurity.

The plot was an angsty romantic drama centering on an unhappy arranged marriage, full of naive and contrived twists, an unpredictable and intimidating love interest with no consistent character, and a creepy, broken-minded father and a high-strung, hostile mother.

The prose was sappy and melodramatic, rambling and longwinded. All too loose with redundancy. Also rather contrived. Although I can't be all sure, I think it wasn't purple though, but that must be result from the overall simpler and straightforward style of Finnish, and the fact I hadn't read anything purple to that day. I indulged in self-fanservice with glee, writing entire mini side plots and longwinded scenes with no other motive than to get to make the couple feed each other chocolate. A year or so later I reread my texts and left notes: "cut everything except the chocolate. Screw that, axe the chocolate as well."

There was only one chapter, a short one, with a heavily horror-themed self-harm motif with a dash of supernatural. I was confident enough about to show it to a friend after I found it. I have since lost the file, but I kind of miss it because the way I remember it and the way my friend reviewed it, it would have been a good candidate to rewrite now that I have some skill.

But yeah... all in all I'm kind of happy I got all that crap out of my system then. First putting it all on paper and later finding it and realising all its weaknesses formed the basis for my writing, and although it was years later before I wrote anything again, it was a good basis. Nothing I've written since has come off as cringe-worthy (although I do find some lesser flaws in my earlier works, especially ghosts of my initial style in the first couple of things I produced when I started writing again).

From 14 to 23 it took me nine years to produce more fanfiction. And compared to the (probably) tens of thousands of words of my earlier efforts, the new piece is a 100-word drabble :P

I'm now 24 and for the last seven years, although my interests still include little else than social drama, my prose has tightened remarkably. It's become natural for me. For some reason though, even if my prose is quite laconic, I am very rambley on forums :I

edited 30th May '12 4:24:07 AM by peccantis

I'm not sure this I'd as bad as most prople's Old Shame, but the foist time I tried to write a long story, I had an extremely blatant Author Avatar with a small number of blatant sueish traits; such as having my ideal career at the time and mismatched eyes.

Of course beyond the fact that my Author Avatar was a fully fledged Doctor at 32, which I hand waved with changes to the education system that meant people generally started college a few years earlier than they usually do now, there wasn't much else to him. He was basically The Ishmael in terms of the plot, didn't have any romances other than one which had been completed prior to the start of the story (he was engaged. At least he was at one point; because his fiancée died along with the real protagonist's hometown). I'm proud to say I was 12 or 13 when I came. Up with this.

edited 30th May '12 8:24:08 AM by Archereon

This is a signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Self-insert Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction

In my defense I was like 9.

Old Shame... Really, where do I start? My biggest weakness is probably my ambitiousness. I planned and planned to create an epic, supposedly very long series, and not even the second arc is done when I dropped it.

Several years ago I've written a poorly done High Fantasy about a knight and a girl from present-day earth which travels together through a supposedly endless tunnel/cave system circling the world, big enough that whole kingdoms develop inside.

And then there's another poor attempt, this time a near blatant self-insert into a magic-oriented Academy of Adventure (which is actually a thinly veiled Negima ripoff). At that time I'm dumb enough to use anagrams of my name and people I know in real life as the names of the characters. Oh, and I abused the hell out of my recently (at that time) acquired Latin dictionary.

Finally, there's a Magical Girl story I made two years ago, involving the girls as agents from Heaven. The concept is pretty good IMO, with Earn Your Happy Ending and pretty much the plotline done. But I realized just how many [[Author Tract Author Tracts are present.

edited 1st Jun '12 1:59:28 PM by LimitRemoval

I don't know if they're actually old shames because I feel like everything I've written to now has just brought me closer to my true potential. I see them less as shameful embarrassments and more as learning experiences that built up my self-esteem as a writer at the time, and would now like to find the last copy resting underneath the American flag planted on the moon.

There was one Mega Crossover fanfiction I had posted over on freewebs that was so incredibly bad, but what always stuck out to me was how I really misrepresented Organization XIII—specifically Axel—before Chain of Memories came out. I based his entire character on the fifteen seconds he appeared in trailers. His character resembled Xemnas...think about that. Oh, and Goku beat Freddy Krueger by ignoring him. Face, meet palm.

My more "serious" writing included a story about a girl being stalked. After meandering for a hundred pages, I began to focus on a plot involving a group of psychic religious cultists, attacks on schools, and a villain who wanted to be a "necessary evil" who wanted to start a global war...and was wasting his time stalking a girl in an apartment. And this would trigger a 13 book series that focused exclusively on a coven of angels fighting an eternal darkness, and...yeah, and each book was about 220K words...Again, face, meet palm.

Still, I learned something from the experiences. I can't say any of these projects were wastes of time, since they did teach me how to write long stories with massive plots from a young age. Still...at least now, I know how to plot things out better.

...this is also why I've written fan-fics. To figure out what works in a story and what doesn't. Now I think I have a good idea...

Avatar The Last Airbender. OOC. Platypusbear rape. That's all I have to say.

Oh, and also a creepy what-if fic where a girl I actually knew got pregnant with my kid. It was really, REALLY fucked up.

Yes. That does sound rather creepy, but at least there's no Anachronism Storm.

Yes, I found yet more old stuff.

Ein Woe having a mini-van (the Woemobile) with no prior explanation how, when he's in a medieval world, mention of technology that works in strange ways, the UCU (United Communist Union) being nothing but what I thought the USSR was at the time - an evil empire that does evil for only one reason "COMMUNISM!" I did not quite know what that was at the time, so it ended up being some strange combination of totalitarianism, Dystopia Justifies The Means and hedonistic beliefs all mixed into one strange philosophy.

Oh, and there was a guy named Morgan Hirath who disappears half way through despite being the main contender for Big Bad. He was stated to be "the villain of the new century", and was said to be "a horrible demon given human form"...and then he's gone.

edited 4th Jun '12 5:38:59 PM by NickTheSwing