Bouts of Nostalgia

As I've already written yesterday, I've rebuild my website and during the process experienced bouts of nostalgia when it came to my old stories. (As I've written in the post, I've put them all on my website - or at least will until it is finished, the 'Slash'-section is still missing.)

I've always liked telling stories and ever since I've had my own computer (I got the first computer at the age of 13), I've written them down. Most of my first tries do not exist any longer ... or only as print-outs (from my old matrix printer - ah, I almost miss the loud noise it made while printing one page in the time my modern laser printer needs for a complete story of 40 pages). I've even written by hand (and the blank book I used for it still has to be somewhere ... can't remember where I put it when I moved into my flat, though) before I had a computer, but it has taken until I've started at university for me to be able to write stories longer than a couple of pages (my currently longest finished story has about 120 pages, the two crime stories I've already pinned out will be about 300 pages each, when finished).

Today I'm a very modern writer - I even have my own binding machine - and I use my computer (with Microsoft Word 2003) and a black-white laser printer for bringing my stories into the world. (In addition I can use my father's colour laser printer whenever I need it - but what is the point in printing in colour when you're just writing?)

But why am I telling you all this? Well, first of all this is my blog and so I can write here whatever I like. In addition I'm telling you this to make it easier for you to understand what I felt when I went over my stories again to put them online.

As I've already pointed out various times, I'm 32 by now, so I've spent almost 20 years writing stories on a computer (not the same, of course...). Over the last weeks I've gone through very old ones - like a fantasy-story with three parts about a wizard I wrote at around 20 - and new ones alike. I didn't always like what I read, most of the old stories I would write differently if I had to write them today ... but I think all writers are like that (and other artists on the whole).

I've felt this reminiscence for the first time when I moved out of my parents flat and into the one I'm still living in, because I had to pack everything and that meant gathering the old stories I'd put into various other files in a large one. I stumbled over my first stories (including a crime story I still rather like today, a vampire story that's quite bad and a piece of Star Trek fan fiction I wrote before knowing what fan fiction is...) and got quite thoughtful about them.

This time I got hit twice as hard - there were a lot more stories to read and get thoughtful about, after all. And I started thinking about all the stories I've never finished - and about the ones I have finished and deleted at some time. And then I started thinking about the stories I've still got to finish... Bouts of nostalgia are no fun!