Memory lane...

So I was reading some of my older material today and all I can say is: wow.

Not wow as in:"Wow that was really good." More of a:"What the hell was I thinking?" type of wow. I mean don't get me wrong, a lot of my old stories either had really good description or a really good story line. All of them had really good characters. I just did not make the best of them.

In a way, it's a good thing I never finished any of them because now I can re-write and re-plot without having to ditch an entire novel. There's only one novel that I finished before Book One and that is going to be really hard to re-write.

All the other ones will be easy. Simply a matter of figuring out where the heck I was trying to go with the plot and getting down to it. It's funny, even my oldest works had something to them that just makes you want to read more...as horridly written as they are. Kind of like morbid curiosity.

Stories older than what I found today are completely laughable. I don't think I can salvage anything but the characters and then I have to try to fit them in somewhere or make a story around them.

I'm glad I took an extra few years before trying to publish anything. It made a huge difference in my abilities as a writer and I can only see myself improving even more as time goes on.

Someone once said that the more you read, the better your own writing becomes. Looking back at my old stories and reading my new ones, I can see that difference. I am also eternally happy for that difference.