The rest of middle school post The First Stand was comprised of my writing on a long Star War's Fan fic based on the online role play of a girl I had a crush on. So once high school rolled around and we went our separate ways I dropped the story, to go back to what I really wanted to write which was my sci-fi version of Lord of The Rings or maybe a bit more Red Storm Rising in space, but I digress.
I started typing, not quiet knowing where I was going, I was just typing as things came to my mind, I got about 50 single spaced pages in before this draft fell apart for reasons that I don't quiet remember anymore. I believe I picked back up the Star Wars story for the simple fact that it was a really damn good story, since I had stripped all the elements of the RP out, and gave it my own dark twist.
In 10th grade I decided that throwing myself at this massive story willy nilly wasn't going to accomplish anything, so I got a spiral notebook and started doing something that I had never done before, but would do for every book I have written since then. I outlined.
Short paragraphs for each and every scene. It allowed me to just go but still monkey around with the plot before I had committed thousands of words, and many hours, to a line of thought that didn't quite work out. I stopped work on the manuscript I had, and started form scratch again, recycling a few things here and there.
The main thing that I kept was this massive conceit at the front of the book in the prologue about how the universe was like feudalism in medieval Europe that went on for close to a thousand words. It was to long, it was creative but didn't add a damn thing to the story. I couldn't cut it because I was a stuck up 14 year old who thought his shit didn't stink. That shit was the massive conceit and it did stick as the opening to a book.
The outline started to go, and go mounting to almost two hundred pages, with characters going everywhere, plot threads that never really ended, problems, but I was ignoring them. At school I would just work on the outline, writing as neat as possible with my uni-ball pin - I do really love those things. When I got home I would start plugging away at the manuscript again. This time I would get to just over 50,000 words before something would come along and plunge me into a stretch where I wouldn't write prose again for a very long time...... screenplays.
To be Concluded....
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