The embarrassments of our youth...

This past weekend I went on a Lichtenbergian Retreat with my fellow Lichtenbergian Craig, and I was actually productive. The main project I had — the library checkout system for the Backstreet Arts library database — was easier than I thought (other than the fact that I couldn’t finish it until I got back to Backstreet and merged the two databases). A couple of other projects got outlined. I also set some artistic goals that are scary. We’ll see if I follow through.

But today’s post is not about any of that. I was determined not to spend any real amount of time on the internet this weekend, and I was largely successful, checking email twice a day and scanning Twitter/Facebook just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything critical. (Apologies to anyone who emailed or messaged me with anything not critical; I saw it, I just didn’t respond to it until I got home.)

In that mindset, I took several books to read. One of them was Gregory Hays’s translation of Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius. It’s long been one of my favorite books — I give it as a graduation present to college grads — and I thought it might be good to reread it. It was exactly what I needed.

The other main book I took to read was a blank book I found during the Great Reorganization.

This book is 52 years old. It is one of three I bought from the Wesleyan College bookstore when I attended the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program in 1970 as an art major.

The other one remains blank after all this time, but this one I used to write an epic fantasy story.

Well, I started an epic fantasy story. I never finished it, and I thought it might be fun to take with me on Retreat to read over my juvenilia.

Dear reader, it was not.

What I wrote as a 16-year-old was painful. My main characters were named Framis and Zilgo. Framis was a prince who apparently had a memory disorder, played for comic relief and no real benefit to the action. Place names were so embarrassingly derivative that I will not repeat them here. (I had just read The Lord of the Rings for the first time.) The authorial tone was coy and chatty, with lots of asides to the Reader. World-building was shallow and my sense of how long it might take to walk across an entire kingdom was spectacularly ignorant.

There were no notes, just good old-fashioned WRITING, start to finish (King of Hearts Fallacy, anyone?), so I have no memory of where I thought the plot was heading. There is some very silly business with a “minor sorceress” who seems to know more about the prince and his valet (whom he hires on the spot after literally bumping into him in the street in a foreign kingdom) than they know about each other, so I think the plot twist was going to be that Zilgo is Framis’s older brother (and actual heir to the throne) who has come looking for him to keep him safe, and Zilgo actually ends up marrying the beautiful (but cursed) Princess Loramund from chapter 1. Probably Sibyl, the sorceress, would end up in a showdown with the evil witch who has possessed Loramund, and maybe the MacGuffin “Spark of Nam” that they’ve gone on a Quest for would be involved in that process, BUT I LITERALLY DON’T REMEMBER.

It doesn’t matter. The writing is execrable and there’s nothing there to save. It will go back on the shelf to await disposal by my heirs and assigns. ABANDONMENT has never felt this good.

One interesting factoid: The first ten pages of the book have been “sealed” with masking tape. A peek tells me that I had started writing a “humorous” history of art. Oy.

Remember, “Failure is always an acceptable option.”