Long Lost Stories

Long Lost Stories

This is gonna be really meta, but I promise I’ll bring it back around.

So I still have my old site, strugglingwriter.wordpress.com, which still maddeningly garners 60 to 100 pageviews a day (sorry, I said I was gonna get meta). I say maddeningly because this is the site I’m most focused on right now, and I get 10 pageviews here on a good day.

Anyway, I saw a huge spike yesterday and today on the old site and after investigation I discovered that a post I had written in 2006(!) had been linked on a tumblr post about writing help. The somewhat odd part was that the post of mine that was linked, Plot Help, was actually me asking for help with my plot, not me offering any kind of writing tips.

Now, I went back and read that post. There’s not really anything exciting about it on the surface and in fact it’s kind’ve blah. However, there is this:

I am at a point in my novel that is key to the whole plot of the work. If I screw this up, there is no going back. 48,000 words will be wasted.

My plot involves a 23 something guy who visits his parents looking for one of his favorite books of his childhood. He doesn’t find the one he is looking for, but does find one that looks interesting that he didn’t remember. As he opens the front cover he sees something written inside. It is a note to himself he wrote when he was eight years old urging him to do or remember something.

Well, I’m sorry to say that the novel did fail. I have almost no recollection of it at all, other than I think that’s the one I wrote in a Moleskine notebook. Sure enough, that is the one. I even have a post where I say I’ve given up on the story and another where I’ve posted pictures of my handwriting.

What gets me most, other than I have a LOT of content over on the old blog, is how foreign all of that stuff feels to me. It’s like it was written by another person. Bizarre.

I wonder where that notebook and story are? I’m hoping, but not positive, that they are still in my nightstand where I left them. I really hope they are, actually. That is my homework to myself today. To find that notebook and see what it contains.

5 thoughts on “Long Lost Stories

  1. Paul, this whole post gives me such a bizarre feeling. It’s as if it were a story… have you started your promised series of flash yet? 🙂
    Anyway, real or not, you should make a short story out of it. You’ve made me very curious about that notebook.

    1. I’ve at least started thinking about the flash thing, but haven’t started writing yet.

      This post is real. While I was writing this post I did think it would be cool if the book I mentioned in this excerpt was actually the real notebook I describe in this post. Would that have to be a time travel story?

  2. It really is strange to look back at old stuff we’ve written, either fiction or blog posts, and feel completely separate from it. I haven’t looked back at old stories for a long time — not sure if I want to, either! lol

    I hope you find your notebook. 🙂

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