talents

I must be having a big ol' retrospective week this week...

I don't know if its because I've been reading a book I haven't read since I was a kid, Blade of the Poisoner (and it's sequel, Master of Fiends)... but while I've been rereading them, it got me thinking...

I've been writing, in one form or another, since I was little... random stories, the odd stab at something larger every now and again... but there's only really ever been one "novel" that I've started that I really followed through on and finished (although I did realise a while ago that most of my attempts at "novels" were all pretty much either short stories, albeit longer ones, or else more like novellas, at least in length).

And that novel was "Talents"...the single greatest artistic theme of my late teenage years. I drew up designs for all the character's costumes, I roughed out plans for two sequels, as well as a kind of sequel/prequel... and I spent way too many afternoons pacing back and forward in my bedroom trying to work out dialogue.

Looking back on it, I never really remembered it as being Pulitzer Prize winning material, but I honestly didn't think it was too bad.

Then I reread Blade of the Poisoner...

It didn't take long for me to realise that I had pretty much lifted the whole thing... concepts, character ideas, naming conventions, the whole plot really... and turned it into my own version. Not intentionally... in fact, I specifically didn't read the books again for the entire time that I was working on my story so that I wouldn't be unduly influenced by it, since I already knew that I was using what amounted to the same premise. Maybe if I had, I would have realised how much I actually stole from the original book.

I also made the mistake of going back and rereading portions of my story while I was in the middle of Blade of the Poisoner this time around... which was a bad idea... because not only didn't I realise how much I'd stolen... but I didn't realise how incredibly BAD my work was. And I mean BAD! Dialogue that would make you roll your eyes and suppress your gag reflex because you couldn't imagine anyone every actually saying those word outloud ever, in the whole history of everything. And incredibly clunky plot machinations, a number of which made no sense... and an ending that kind of smacked of deus ex machina...

Actually, I might have known it was bad earlier... because Ludo and I took a stab at rewriting it at one point, but we didn't get much further than the first few pages. And weirdly enough, I only seem to have an electronic copy of the version we tried to change... not the original untouched version, which, for me, is very odd... I'm usually really anal about keeping original versions of things... or at least one untouched copy.

The other thing that's kinda weird is looking back on something that you were so proud of at one point... and realising that was actually pretty crap. And being okay with that.

Granted, if I hadn't realised how much of it I'd lifted from Blade of the Poisoner, than I might have been a little more bummed about it... but at least this way, it was somebody else's ideas I didn't do justice to, rather than my own.

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