While I was going through my computer, I decided to go through some of my old writings. I was not impressed. Most of my writings were done for high school. Each quarter, we were required to write a portfolio. We would write it, edit it, and create multiple drafts until the english teacher decided we were done. I decided to read through two of them to see if the were still good.

One of them I read was an early work. It was done in 2008. It was called The Queen of the Underworld. Looking back, it was poorly written, with a confusing story, things just happening at random, an a dues ex machima ending. I also spoil the story in the opening paragraph!

It’s not the worst (One only needs to look at the abomination that is the story about the sand-witch, which was my first story), but it’s by no means good.

I used a text-to-speech program to read the story, and turned it into a mp3 file.

As you can see, it’s pretty bad. It’s also made a bit silly with the different voices for dialogue. I also, in hindsight, should have used a female voice for the narrator, since the protagonist is female.

To show my reaction to this story, I made a picture that I made by editing pictures together.

I meant it to be a brief recap of the story, showing the villain, her monsters, and the heroine, represented by Fluttershy of My Little Pony. It also shows anyone remotely normal’s reaction to it. It turned out pretty good, if a little cluttered. However, I do believe that it shows the reaction well.

The other writing I read was from 2010. It’s clearly a lot better. It’s called The Eternal Element War. The storyline is much clearer. It’s more of poem. I wrote a lot of them. I wrote so many of them that the teacher told me to not write as much poems. She also tried to get me to write more nonfiction, because I tend to focus on writing fiction. It didn’t really work.

The story’s not perfect. It’s a bit rushed, there isn’t really a lot of characterization, and it comes off a bit preachy. Unlike the other one, however, I’m not embarrassed by it.

Like with the other writing, I used a text-to-speech program to read the story, and turned it into a mp3 file.

Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s mush more tolerable. Also helping is that it’s not as silly as the other one because there’s no dialogue, and thus it only has one voice.

Like with the other story, I made a picture. Like with a previous post, I used a dress up game. The game can be found on this website.

As you can see, all of the elements are clearly female. The game I used only allows you to create female elements. Since in the story Fire and Air are male, I tried to hide the fact that they were clearly female in the game.

I ended up liking this one less than the other one because it’s simply them standing there and it’s kinda boring. The other one was slightly played for humor. Secondly, even with the futile task of making Fire and Air look male, it was pretty simple to create the picture. With the other one, I had to find the picture and edit them together in GIMP.

In the end, I guess what I’m trying to say through all this rambling is that even if you think you totally failed at being a writer, with practice and time you will improve. It also helps if you can make fun of your bad works, like making a picture of it.