Time To Get Real

Whoa...

For the past couple of weeks, I've been going through my archived stuff and realized that I have a lot of buried gems. Here's a basic laundry list of my untyped work:

1. A queen on a quest to find the perfect mate(basically the end of "The Queen of Sed: Search for a King" )

2. An erotic romance that involves a very unusual matchmaking service

3. A half-finished novel about werecats

4. My original attempt at writing: a action/adventure story set in Ancient Nubia

And bits and pieces of other stuff that didn't hold my attention past ten pages. Even though I don't intend on resurrecting any of these stories online, it's refreshing to "go back in time" and see how I wrote back in the day. My work used to be anti-Buffy, anti-mainstream, pretty much the reverse of everything I thought was wrong with the santized, clean-cut media of the 90s and early 2000s. But while I was so deadset on being anti-whatever, I wasn't really working on developing my own style, and good plot development. My characters seemed to fall flat, with little if any history to keep a reader invested, not to mention the fuck-and-run attitude that most of them seem to have. Looking back on some of the things I started writing ten years ago, I have to actually laugh at what I considered to be good fiction. Well, maybe it was good for a teenager. LOL

Today a lot has changed, but I'm still a little anti-whatever. I try to get away from girl-flick type romance and over-sexualized eroticism by maintaining a tenuious balance between the two. My fantasy and science fiction pieces are set in unfamiliar places but become familiar through three-dimensional emotional characters. I wouldn't say that my stories are perfect, but I'd say that they're awesome. And still getting better.

Is there anyone else out there that who can see an improvement between what they've written years ago, and the way they write now?