I spent some time digging through old storage boxes in an attempt to find the cache of my old lyrics, written in my teens and early twenties when I wanted to be in a band. My hope was that were would be something decent enough to pass on to my husband to use in one of his dance/techno compositions. (You can check him out on Soundcloud or Youtube.)

Needless to say, all of my compositions were VERY word heavy (being a lyricist and not also a composer will do that to you) but some of them weren’t bad. I could definitely tell when I was in my Elvis Costello or Siouxsie Sioux phase but at least I was clever about it. I have no idea of Richard will use any of them, but I wouldn’t be embarrassed if he did.

I also found the two fantasy novels I wrote in my mid-teens to early twenties, before I switched to horror for a while. My influences were clear (Andre Norton for the older one, perhaps early Patricia McKillip for the second) and my style occasionally mannered (and it sometimes still is) but there was still good stuff there. It was clear that plot has never really been my strong point, I suck at writing swordfights and action scenes, I thought it entirely reasonable for someone to have blue skin and purple hair, and that I could endlessly recycle the names of countries and queens. Still, there were images that I thought worked quite well, dialogue that still made me smile for the right reasons, and some sentences that made me think “damn, that’s actually pretty good.”

So it could have been worse. I’m trying to keep those small pleasures and victories in mind as I go through yet ANOTHER review of the Glass World Thing I keep trying make into a novel. There’s one in there somewhere. Maybe I’ll find it in another 40 years….