First Times...always special...not always great
Can you tell I like misleading (and often disturbing) intros? Anyway... the first book is always special... just not always great. Around the blogsphere authors are being very, very brave and revealing excerpts from their first times. Gena and Jill and Diana... have kicked it off. I love love love Diana's title "A Bride walks into a bar..." it is exactly the same kind of humor I have, and like her, I'm often reduced to saying, "Get it? It's a joke..." Anyway, Diana I'd pick it up.
My first time... well I guess I don't know if my first time really counts... gosh, don't I sound like a teen, huh? Remember that scene in Sixteen Candles when she gets the quiz and answers the question "Have you done it?" with "I don't know". Well, anyway... the book I consider my first was not completed, and so probably doesn't count. BUT still, I wrote it when I was about 15 (which is the funny part) and it reads a bit like The House of the Rising Sun (which is like a whore house). The mobster guy is the hero. Are you seeing some problems? Perhaps Puzo wasn't such great reading fodder for a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD?!?! But one of my "readers" did say that it was very Sidney Sheldon-like, which was high praise indeed! (and no, I'm not telling you the title, because it was the best part of the book and I'll probably re-use it!)
Oh well, one day I pull it out and read it and laugh. I'll probably be very embarrassed too, because I had my grandmother read some of it and she was a very old fashioned, deep Georgia South lady. She rode to school in a horse drawn cart for goodness sakes! But she loved it and encouraged my writing. And that is what is important.
The officially finished first book went very badly in terms of page count. It became a saga, then went the way of the Russians, and then topping out at well over 900 pages (conservative estimate) became a phone book. I probably had as many characters as one at any rate... But it still has some promise, I just have to get the chain saw out and make 3 or 4 books out of it.
My first time... well I guess I don't know if my first time really counts... gosh, don't I sound like a teen, huh? Remember that scene in Sixteen Candles when she gets the quiz and answers the question "Have you done it?" with "I don't know". Well, anyway... the book I consider my first was not completed, and so probably doesn't count. BUT still, I wrote it when I was about 15 (which is the funny part) and it reads a bit like The House of the Rising Sun (which is like a whore house). The mobster guy is the hero. Are you seeing some problems? Perhaps Puzo wasn't such great reading fodder for a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD?!?! But one of my "readers" did say that it was very Sidney Sheldon-like, which was high praise indeed! (and no, I'm not telling you the title, because it was the best part of the book and I'll probably re-use it!)
Oh well, one day I pull it out and read it and laugh. I'll probably be very embarrassed too, because I had my grandmother read some of it and she was a very old fashioned, deep Georgia South lady. She rode to school in a horse drawn cart for goodness sakes! But she loved it and encouraged my writing. And that is what is important.
The officially finished first book went very badly in terms of page count. It became a saga, then went the way of the Russians, and then topping out at well over 900 pages (conservative estimate) became a phone book. I probably had as many characters as one at any rate... But it still has some promise, I just have to get the chain saw out and make 3 or 4 books out of it.
posted by wilddunz at 9:59 AM
2 Comments:
My first try at the old pen and paper rests in a disk. Hidden. In a secret place. Where no one knows. Hopefully after I die, and I'm very famous, no one will find it.
Its. That. Bad.
Hmmm. I wrote my very first novel at 15 too, but I've never really counted it, because I never finished it.
I have no idea how long it was, because I never printed the whole thing out, and it was written on a Brother wordprocessor, which had no wordcount function.
Later, I re-typed the whole thing into Word Perfect. And even later, that computer crashed and died. There were no survivors. I lost the whole thing.
But it's just as well. It read like a bad soap opera.
Is that an oxymoron?
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