It’s officially the 1st of July! I mentioned it in my last post but I’ve joined Camp NaNoWriMo thanks to my author buddy Freya Winther. If anyone wants to add me as a friend you can view my profile by Clicking Here or just searching for ebalderson.
This is a busy month, like most months, so I set my goal at 20,000 words. However, I’m hoping I can blow past that if I have the time! It took me a little bit of thought to decide what I wanted to write about this month, so I began scrolling through my archive of old stories and ideas. I found one of the first stories I’d ever written (at least that I still have saved), all the way from 2004.
It was the story of a boy, descended from a sorcerer, trying to save his family from an evil monster. It was born from old Saturday morning cartoons and anime. From what I can recall way back then, I loved making up stories. Both my own and fanfiction of my favorite things to watch. Even though I did a lot of it, I was notoriously bad at grammar, punctuation, and so on. That didn’t stop me from writing things and even sharing them back then! Ah to be young and not care so much.
This was my first big story. I was extremely protective of it. Going as far as password protecting the document way back then. As if someone was going to steal it… It was pretty short by my standards today, roughly 6000 words, and sadly I never finished it. That brings me to July 2022 Camp NaNoWriMo! I’m going to take this old story, characters, and ideas of my kid self and rewrite it with… let’s say more precision and experience. I’m going to try to keep it more light-hearted than most of my other work.
For now I’ll leave you with the ORIGINAL FIRST CHAPTER of Pagefinder (Old title, I may be reworking) in all of its terrible glory.
A long time ago, during The Dark Medieval Ages. In a cabin deep in the woods. There was a sorcerer named Durac who had a book; a book of Magic; a book called “The book of Durac”. Durac used this book To Cast his spells. His greatest challenge was stopping the great evil beast called “Revol” he had not slain it but had locked it in his book. He had his book until the end of his time. He took 5 pages out of the book to make sure no bad could ever get the ultimate power, and gave to Four knights each of them hid it somewhere in the world. Durac hid the fourth page where no one could ever find it. Durac also took the book to a secret underground location where he could hide it forever. Because in the book was the horrible beast he had locked in the book. The place he had hid the book became also his final resting place. For Many Generations the book and its pages stayed hid.
Yep, that was it! A whole chapter in about 200 words. I had different standards back then. Also, with the way I used to write back then… I can’t help but read it in William Shatner’s voice.
Happy July everyone!