Cyde Weys Musings

I’m a digital pack rat. I have everything I’ve ever written on a computer squirreled away on my current computer, including over a dozen years of homework assignments. It’s not too hard to do. Each time I’ve upgraded computers, I’ve simply copied the Documents folder on the old computer into the new Documents folder on the new computer. In this way, I have them nested several deep, and delving farther into the nesting of my Documents folders is like peeling back the archaeological layers and looking further and further into my past. This is possible because hard drive space has increased exponentially over the years (my current computer’s hard drives store 400GB each; my first computer’s, 100MB).

Every now and again I look back through my old documents to refresh myself on how I once was. Memories fade with time, but the things I’ve written haven’t changed at all in these intermittent years, and give my present self an enlightening window into my past. Recently, I was looking through my documents from eighth grade (nine years ago) and I came across a science fiction short story I wrote that I still vaguely remembered to this day. Now, if anyone else were to do what I am about to do, I would call foul, saying they had no right to make fun of my work from when I was just a kid, still learning how to write. But since I’m doing it to myself, I have the freedom to be as merciless as the sheer awfulness of my work merits.

I’m going to spare you the displeasure of reading the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt.

As Blop went outside to chat with his friends, something horribly fiendish was happening right outside of the Lyloxian solar system. Something big was going on; a convention of ships. Not any ships, though, for these were the flagships of the Baborian Navy. Destroyers and battleships kept on appearing out of the blue mist that was hyperspace. The ships all seemed to have a focal point. They were meeting on the spatial coordinates (342.007, 486.430, 477.573). Their target was the homeworld of the binary starsystem Zol, comprised of the stars Unan and Uras, Unan being the larger one. Their target was Lyloxia. They meant business. Rarg had specifically stated that he wanted the inhabitants of Lyloxia eradicated completely so that a living colony could be set up.

There are so many things wrong with this single paragraph that it would be impossible to list all of them, so let’s cover the most grievous. Back then, my idea of science fiction seemed to be constituted mainly of aliens, weird unpronounceable names, spaceships (of course!), and meaningless technobabble numbers (you can tell I watched an unhealthy amount of Star Trek as a youth). I picked this excerpt because it is representative, not because it is especially egregious. The whole story was like this. Each new sentence reveals a fresh smattering of random letters I’d pulled directly from my ass. Out of the 2,556 words in this story, my spell checker doesn’t recognize 188. That’s 7.4%!

It didn’t help that the main characters were hard to relate to. The Lyloxians, the protagonist race of the series, was a species of intelligent land squid. Their mortal enemies, the Baborians, were semi-intelligent ruthless boar-like creatures who nevertheless managed to pilot spaceships. The Lyloxians didn’t have hands; they had pseudopods (eight of them). And they didn’t have genders, so all of them were referred to as “it”s. You can imagine how torturous the writing got in places. I wouldn’t wish reading any of it upon even the vile Baborians (Which, if you haven’t figured out by now, as supposed to be space barbarians. Clever huh?). The characters were as bad as the prose was unflowing. I know it’s hard for something to have no redeeming virtues, but my Lyloxian story sure tried hard at it. I wish I could slap my teacher through time for grading this travesty as an A.

It’s damn near impossible to write a story entirely from the perspective of aliens that are significantly different than us (no Star Trek prosthetic aliens need apply). The only such story I’ve ever read that handled this decently was The Gods Themselves, by none other than the great Isaac Asimov. I’m sure I read that novel just before I tried to write my Lyloxian story, and then failed completely and utterly in attempting to imitate it. The only good thing I can point out about my story is that at least the spelling and grammar are good, skills I apparently got good at much sooner than decent storytelling.

Just in case you somehow didn’t yet think that this story is absolutely terrible, let me present another excerpt:

Blop woke up in the tree. Blop was alive now only because it had been above the neural toxins, which were heavier than Lyloxia’s air. It was about to jump down, but then it remembered the terrible things it had witnessed. It shuddered uncontrollably in a high branch of the tree. The bodies of Lyloxians were being hauled to pits where they were summarily burned. Blop decided that it had to do something, even if it was only to kill one or two Baborians. Blop quickly formulated a plan in its mind, a very risky one, indeed.

Blop realized that all of the operators of the landing craft were burning dead Lyloxians. It decided that its best bet was to try to control the starship. So it began doing small stretches up in the tree, getting ready for when big stretches would mean the difference between life and death. Blop assumed that this was happening all over the world, but in actuality, there was one small group of survivors in a village south, named Urargo.

I am so glad I’ve improved as a writer since I wrote this drivel. Just looking at another short story I wrote in twelfth grade (this one a bit longer), I can see that it is much, much better. It resembles my current writing more than it does this Lyloxian mess. Somewhere in the intervening period I became significantly better at writing. I finally learned how to string sentences together so that they would flow, and I improved my storytelling to the point that it wasn’t cringeworthy. Compare this Lyloxian story with one of my efforts from late last year, Invasion Day. The difference is night and … invasion day. So let this serve as example that, even if you aren’t a good writer now, you too can make significant improvements in your writing ability in a relatively short period of time. All you have to do is write until your fingertips bleed, fall off, and then your knuckle stumps become hard and blackened.

After high school, I continued writing in college, eventually ending up as an opinion columnist for University of Maryland’s school newspaper, The Diamondback. Then, I started this blog, and in a little over one year since, I’ve churned out 400 posts. Heck, I even wrote a novel in November. Writing is my favorite activity that I could conceivably make a living off of, and if everything works out, that’s what I would love to be doing full time. But I’m realistic — it’s hard to make it as a writer, and my current profession, IT Consultant, isn’t exactly shabby. But in the mean time I will continue pressing on with my writing, getting better and better, and hoping that it all somehow works out.

Now just don’t make me read that damn story from eighth grade again. I can’t believe I ever thought naming a main character “Blop” was a good idea.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 21:16 and is filed under Fiction, Humor, Personal. Keywords: Tags: college, drivel, high school, Isaac Asimov, middle school, novel, science fiction, scifi, sf, squid, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.