#MyFirstPostRevisited: Remembering SKYBORNE

Loni Townsend tagged me on an interesting blog hop, one started by Sarah Brentyn at Lemon Shark.  It's pretty self-explanatory - take a look back at your first post, link it or paste it in your new entry, and talk about it - so I figured, what could go wrong?

Despite my taunting of Murphy's Law, I found my first post wasn't so bad.  I originally created this blog for a writing contest, in which I was pitching SKYBORNE, a book that was a great deal of fun to write but was also incredibly indulgent in a self-referential kind of way, since it featured a main character who read stories about a world I'd created many years ago.  That world turned out to be real, but it had been shattered, and its gods enlisted her to help put it back together.  The plot entailed her traveling upward via breaking through stars, finding her way through different parts of the world she knew from the books, until she broke out and found that she'd been traveling through one of the moons that orbited the now-shattered world.  There, she was able to use a deific machine to re-create the world based on all that she'd read.

There are times when I'm sure my ideas are getting weirder as I get older, then I look at what I just wrote, and I'm thinking, nope, my stuff has always been this weird.

There are a lot of reasons why the book didn't work.  I loved the main characters, and continued to write them in other books, but I think my love for them kept me from making sure other people would love them too - I just assumed it would come out in my writing and that was that.  Also, this story would have been a horrible way to start a series, which is of course what I wanted to do.  I mean, the first book is about putting the entire world back together after it's been shattered.  How the hell was I supposed to follow that?

SKYBORNE, after spending some time in the query trenches and being submitted to several contests, went the way of all my other books.  It took me just under a year from when I wrote that first entry to leave it behind - the entry is from May 3, 2012, and on May 5, 2013, I wrote about putting the book behind me.

I've trunked fourteen books over the years, but I remember this one, because SKYBORNE is the only one I've ever printed out just to set on fire.  It was a cleansing thing, I swear.

Looking back now, it feels like not a lot has changed.  I'm still writing weird stuff and flinging it out into the void, assuming I think it's worth sharing at all.  But I think it's worth looking at the old ideas sometimes.  Even if nothing comes of it, sometimes it helps to remember that I still put in the time and got all these books done.  Other times, it just depresses me, but there are times when just about anything can depress me, so that's nothing new.

I don't think this is a story I could go back to, and I don't really want to.  As for whether or not I'd write another incarnation of these characters, I truly don't know.  I have ideas for a few possible plots, but of the fifteen books I've written, these two are in seven of them.  I think that's enough, yeah?

Anyway.  I don't want to tag anyone for the blog hop, because I have no idea what y'all have planned for your blogs or how you want to do them, but if you decide to play along, here are the rules:

Obvious rules:

• No cheating. (It must be your first post. Not your second post, not one you love…first post only.)
• Link back to the person who tagged you (thank them if you feel like it or, if not, curse them with a plague of ladybugs).

Other rules:

• Cut and paste your old post into a new post or reblog your own bad self. (Either way is fine but NO editing.)
• Put the hashtag #MyFirstPostRevisited in your title.
• Tag five (5) other bloggers to take up this challenge.
• Notify your tags in the comment section of their blog (don’t just hope they notice a pingback somewhere in their spam).
• Feel free to cut and paste the badge to use in your post.
• Include “the rules” in your post.

Next week: the Recommended Reading I said I'd do this week.  :P