History of Writing

Random post is random. I was inspired by this thread on art improvement, so I dug up my old writing to see how much I've improved. The answer: a lot. (See how eloquent I am now, using phrases like "a lot?") I know it's not as fun as looking at pictures, but hopefully some of you will find this interesting. The following are samples of my writing from over the years. Any spelling or grammar errors are from the original text.

(1993) One day a girl named Rose saw a rainbow out of her bedroom window.
Then she looked at something else.
A bush was moving and then she saw a peacock.
It went flying off to the rainbow.
All of a sudden she heard Rose wake up.
Rose sat up and looked out of the window and she saw a rainbow.

There's a double rainbow joke in here somewhere. And yes, that's the entire story.

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(1995)
Narrator: When the princess reached the bed where her mother lay, the doctor was just packing up. Isabella asked what was wrong, and the doctor answered
Doctor: I'm afraid she won't live.
Princess Isabella: But she has to!
Doctor: The only cure I see is the flower of healing in the middle of the forest, but yoou could never get to it. Nobody knows excatly where the flower is and all whho have gone searching never game back.
Princess Isabella: I don't care, I'm going to find it.
(Leave Princess)
Doctor: She sure has fire!

This is from a play I wrote to stave off my boredom one fine summer. My friends and I performed and filmed the entire thing, and the tape has since "mysteriously" gone missing.

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(1998) The Princess Katrina lay still under the covers of her bed. She could hear the cold wind outside, throwing itself against the castle walls, seeking a way in. A stray breeze wormed its way in through a crack and wrapped itself around the princess. She shivered delicately. Katrina knew that soon her maidservants would be coming in to dress her, then another long tiring day would begin.

More princess stories. Go figure. I loved fairy tales as a child (still do), so a lot of my writing tended towards fantasy and princesses. This was an awfully generic tale about adventures and magic and a unicorn and some dragons and a witch and a mermaid and other stuff.

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(1999) As you know, I am Sandra. I have a younger sister named Jane. She and I love birds. Finally, we convinced our parents that we were responsible enough to own pets. We especially asked for some birds to care for. I wanted macaws, Jane wanted canaries, or maybe it was finches. We got parakeets instead.

This was from some school assignment or other. I'm not entirely sure what the prompt was, but if I had to guess now, it was probably something like "Write something heartwarming about family and stuff."

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(2002) My piano is haunted. I'm not sure how, although I have a guess. I believe that many years ago a young girl was crushed by a falling piano. It was this untimely death that caused her to haunt the piano forever. While I can only guess the cause of the haunting, I know for a fact that it is haunted. Every time I play, I can hear crying and even screams of despair in my house. Sometimes I am so attuned to her that I even hear these cries coming from outside. Once she even possessed my dog. While I was playing piano, he went into a frenzy and attacked me.

An excerpt from a comedic monologue I wrote for a stage audition, and my first real foray into writing comedy. I see a lot of places where I could make it funnier now, but at least it was good enough to land me a (small) role. XD

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(2005)
Ryan: Hey, I have a question.
Salad: Yes?
Ryan: Is your name really Salad?
Salad: It is.
Ryan: How'd you get a name like Salad?
Salad: Haha, funny story there. Apparently when my mom was pregnant with me, she craved salad a lot. Dad had to go on so many midnight runs trying to find places that were still open. Once he almost got arrested because someone thought he was trying to break into an restaurant.
Ryan: So you were named Salad because you mom craved it a lot? That's uh...
Salad: Hey, I'm just glad she didn't crave chicken legs.
Ryan: Haha, good point. Your parents sound like interesting people.
Salad: Hmm...I wouldn't know. I haven't seen them in awhile.

From a modern fairy tale I wrote. I was planning on making this into an audio drama. Maybe I'll rewrite it into a VN someday. Bonus points if you can name the fairy tale it's based on.

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(2006) Fai rubbed the leather binding on her sword hilt thoughtfully. Her eyes were distant, and her mouth moved slowly as she spoke silent words to herself. Mei watched in silence, knowing that Fai would make all things clear when she was ready. A playful smile flickered across her face. "Ah, never mind about what I said earlier, Mei. There are only three of them." She climbed the ladder that was set against the skylight and paused at the top. "You'd better have breakfast ready for me when I come back." With that, she slowly lifted the glass on the skylight and crept onto the roof.
Mei pouted. "Only three? That's not enough time to finish cooking even one..." Even as he turned to pour the batter onto the hot metal pan, he could hear the sound of metal clashing upon metal. The batter bubbled up on the pan, hissing as it hit the hot oil. The hissing sound was suddenly drowned out by a scream. Mei winced at the sound. "She's going overboard again," he told the batter as he poked it with a spatula. As the batter began to solidify into a golden cake, he lifted it gently with the spatula and flipped it over. Before the cake touched the pan, the front door burst open.
"I'm hungry!" Fai declared. Mei glanced up to see her carrying an unconscious man over her shoulders. "Breakfast, please!" She dumped the man on the floor unceremoniously and shut the door, pulling the bolt shut behind her.
"It's not ready," Mei declared. "You're too impatient."
"Aww..." Fai whined. "But I went sloooow! It's not my fault the other two ran away!"
"Well it's not my fault that hotcakes only cook so fast," Mei retorted. "Now be patient."
"Fiiiiine," Fai rolled her eyes. "Just let your guardian and protector STARVE, will you?"
Mei glared at her impassively, "You already ate two strawberies."

How can someone glare impassively? I don't know! Does it matter? You'd think I'd know better by this point in time, but apparently I didn't. And hey, surprise! More fantasy! Go figure.

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(2009) I've always wished I could be someone else. Not that I don't like being me or anything. I have a pretty good life. Top of my class at Northern Trust Boarding School, second place on the regional kendo circuit, and plenty of friends. I just think that it would be interesting to see the world through someone else's eyes for once. That sort of thing fascinates me. I mentioned it once to Chance over our bunsen burners in chemistry.
“Why would you wanna be someone else? ” she asked, a look of horror on her face. She twirled a curl of naturally blonde hair around her manicured fingers as she did so. She always did that when she got nervous. “Don't let The Dragon hear you say that. He'll think you're not grateful!”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to the experiment at hand, noting down a change in color of our solution as it began to reach a boil. “I didn't say I don't like being me. I just want to see the world through someone else's eyes.”
“Well, I don't,” Chance retorted. “It sounds dumb.” She leaned over to copy the notes I had just scribbled down. A part of me was tempted to write some sort of nonsense in my notebook to see if she'd copy that too, but I refrained. Making Chance unhappy was probably the stupidest move in the world. Well, I suppose making The Dragon unhappy would be worse, but at least he wasn't my lab partner.

This is from a tie-in/spinoff novel that I was writing for the Jisei series, but I changed a lot of the back story and history before releasing Jisei, so the novel is officially not canon anymore. In other words, don't read too much into this.