Five Years Time

Oh
Five years time
I might not know you
Five years time
We might not speak
Oh
In five years time
We might not get along
In five years time
You might just prove me wrong

-- Five Years Time, Noah and The Whale (Here at YOUTUBE)


Today I started my re-write of Meaning and Mystery of the Rose, and I use the word re-write exactly the way it means. I tried to remember the original plot line and started over with a clean slate. Glanced at the original copy after I'd written about ten pages, but that was it. And boy, was I glad. I couldn't even bring myself to re-use anything in the original. It was just...terrible.

But then I glanced at the date I published it. October of 2004. Nearly FIVE YEARS AGO. And this taught me something. In five years, I have learned something about writing. I have improved. And that made me feel really good.

I wrote the exact same scene two different ways, and I have to say, the second version reads in a much more fluent fashion. The original first chapter of MaMotR (Ha, I just realized that rhymes with LotR; are my acronyms good or what?) was so busy, so hectic. I changed scenes about six different times in four pages. Obviously I wanted to get to the good stuff. In this new draft, we spend at least a page with each character before moving somewhere else. Also the transistions between those scenes are a little more fluid.

You can read the old copy here. I'm trying to figure out some place to archive the new text so you can compare it with the old one and laugh along with me at how gung-ho I was about my writing at the age of fifteen.