377 Days - Blog #50 finding inspiration at the beginning

I’ve been contemplating pulling some abandoned manuscripts out of the neglect pile to put some of this recently acquired discipline towards a resurrection.  I have a virtual neglect folder on both my computers… and undoubtedly in that box of floppy disks I’m not sure I can toss even though I really don’t have a way of reading what is stored on them.  I also have a milk crate of manila folders, full of handwritten pages from high school, college, hours spent in the Great Hall, and coffee shops in London.

Most of those manila folders is a fantasy epic I started in tenth grade after going to see Robin Hood Prince of Thieves in the theater five times.  My fascination with Christian Slater turned into a fascination with castles and an alternate universe version of the teenage romances/crushes in which my friends and I entangled our imaginations.   The draft in those folders was something like 1000 pages that I would type up every night as a reward for doing my homework.  I had a friend who obliged me every morning on the bus as I handed her the pages and sometimes a questionnaire of her impressions and thoughts as to where it was going next.  The crazy thing is, I didn’t save the document.  Of course, I typed it on an IBM from 1988… so I’m sure it would have ended up on one of those floppy disks anyway.

But I ended up rewriting the whole thing anyway.  I re-typed pieces of the original, integrating it with a less melodramatic update in college.  I even took some of the scenes to writing classes to workshop.  I picked it up and put it down many more times over the following years, most especially when I worked at Higgins or hiked through the heather and gorse of Northwest Ireland or lollygagged on the ivy laden paths of Hampstead Heath.  I almost started a full out re-boot just before I decided to complete a vampire novel.

It is pretty epic.  Still melodramatic.  Maybe I’ve outgrown it.  Or maybe I haven’t grown into it yet.

So I went to look through those folders in the milk crate tonight.  It’s a weird sort of journal into my psyche from age 16 to 17 – the very puritanical notion of romance and true love I had then.  And the really dorky concept of heroism.  But, truth be told, I didn’t get very far with those folders yet.

I got distracted by this amazing little find.

I remember going to a toy store with my mother (and maybe the company of some other friend).  This is what I picked out.  I may have even gotten some colored pencils to go with it for the coloring part.  I remember thinking what crazy possibility there was in writing a story.  How much promise was in each of those pages.

Much like that manuscript, I go through the fill in the blank pages and see how I pulled it out at various ages.  Sometimes my new perfection of printing occupied the entire page with one sentence.  On others, I curled my cursive letters.  On a couple others, it was a pretend assignment graded by a pretend teacher in a game of school.  And then on one or two other pages were neat and tidy letters of a tiny size with the flowery language of my early adulthood.

There are still a few blank pages.  I am half tempted to fill one or two in.  There is something about going back to where I began.  The coals of those first inspirations are still burning hot… and somewhere in there, a story will be forged.