Failure

Yes, it had problems. A great many problems. But be nice.

When I was in high school, I decided to start a novel. My creative writing class, taught by an awesome teacher, gave me the courage to do so. I was afraid, initially, because I had started two before (one, about broken glass and the other about Peter Pan), and they were quite horrible.

I was afraid to write another horrible, incomplete novel.

I had dreams of being published when I was teenager and going off into fame and glory. In fact, I still have those dreams. It just didn't happen. Which was probably a good thing.

So thus started my writing of The Tale of Tamicus-Mylo, which later became Boy of the Spiral City.

It was fraught with bad ideas gone awry. An initial mindless read may not be so bad, but on second thought, there are plot holes, inconsistencies, and etc. People aren't really motivated by internal motivations. They just do things. Just because.

Perhaps there are some ideas in that book that I am still drawn to: the woman characters are especially interesting, and there are some scenes that are still quite vivid. The combat throughout wasn't that bad either.

But in the end, I realized that this novel was more of a learning experience than something that could become a finished product.

Anecdotes:

1. I was watching an episode of Batman Beyond, an animated TV show that I watched on occasion on Saturday mornings when I was younger. I had found the TV show online again. And there was this villain who had a creepy resemblance to my own villain in my first novel--a red scar down his spine, etc. Sometimes, your ideas come from random places.

2. My main character resembles my husband in some superficial ways. They both have dark pasts (sort of). They both hunt a lot. Etc. My husband's favorite place to hunt is the red desert, a place that is full of black volcanic rocks. And it resembles PERFECTLY the world of Nazobi, where my main character learned to hunt. I wrote this before I met my husband. Things were meant to be.