One thing that can be said about my youthful writing: it was ambitious. I created entire worlds through which my characters ran, and even if they weren't elaborately plotted, they were definitely elaborately imagined. I also developed parts of my current writing style then--a certain 'seat-of-the-pantsness,' which serves me well for vignettes. It's much more difficult to write long fiction in the same way, though, and I find myself now having to let stories percolate in my mind for months, even years, before they drip into full existence.

This story was written when I was eleven or twelve, in an ancient word processor on an XT. Transcribing it identically was a major pain in the arse, mainly because the way it did underlining didn't do the spaces between words. Argh. As a result of this, the raw AbiWord file is absolutely massive. Thank the gods for .zabw.

Don't read this expecting something fantastic. It's basically the earliest bit of writing that's survived to this day, and the only reason it survived is that my sister had a copy I gave her and she gave it back to me a few years ago. That copy was missing the first page or two, which is why it starts in the middle of the action. Trust me, you're not missing much--the main character went to a library and got sucked into a book entitled 'Cycle's End.' I wonder if I could sue whoever made The Pagemaster . . .

Cycle's End Version Zero [AbiWord, OpenOffice]

Return to the abandoned fiction index.