I was using the Internet Archive to see if I could find some of my old websites, and I came across the first incarnation of pixelscribbles. Back then I called it Pixel Scribbles, and it was hosted on my QX.net homepage. Here’s a screenshot:
I was ecstatic to see that huge list of my writing…but then I tried clicking on the links. Archive.org did not archive my writing!
Grr.
Fortunately, all the poetry listed there is still here, and AJ gave me his copy of The Vukin Project…but the rest of it is gone.
So, here’s the list of writing on that page, and a brief description of each thing, as best as I can remember.
Short Stories
“Jack” – This was a vignette about a guy getting shot. I used the phrase “the bullet impending to his arm”, which is grammatically incorrect, but I thought it was a revolutionary and perfectly acceptable use of the word at the time. Written while I was in high school.
“The Beginning” – This was a Star Wars story, about how Leia decided to join the Rebellion. Or maybe the next one was. I forget which was which; their titles suck. Written (I think) during or after my first year of college at UAH.
“The Decision” – Another Star Wars story. If this isn’t the Leia one, then it’s the one with Yoda and Obi-Wan carting the newborn twins away from Vader. Obviously this was written before the prequels came out. Written (I think) during or after my first year of college at UAH.
“The Definition of Love” – I was very proud of this story. It was pretty dark. I actually don’t want to give a synopsis, because I might rewrite it someday. Originally written during my first year of college at UAH, and later formatted to look like a magazine article for my first Creative Writing class at UK.
“A Slip of the Tongue” – This was a vignette about how it feels to say something that hurts someone else’s feelings. Written during high school, I’m guessing sophomore year.
“Double Date” – This was a true story, written for my Advanced Writing class at UK, about Sean and me going to Outback with our friends William and Michelle. Written in 1999.
“Replace the Carpet” – In one of my writing classes at UK, the professor said it was impossible to write a story in second person. So, I wrote a story in second person. (It was actually in first person, but you couldn’t tell that until the very end.)
Novels
The Vukin Project – This is the story about that bald guy, and the REVOLUTION!, or something. ;> I started this when I was a teenager and continued it during my first year of college at UAH.
Warrior – This was the first of what was supposed to be a string of fantasy novels, although I didn’t really have much of an idea of where the story was going to go. This first installment involved a young man growing into a hero. The second story was about his daughter (who of course didn’t know her father was a hero). I started this when I was around 15.
Essays
All of these essays were written for classes at the University of Kentucky. I had some nice linguistics papers that I didn’t put online because I didn’t want to mess with the IPA fonts, and I had a huge set of essays written for my 2001 Japan trip that was also never put online. Oh well, it’s not like I have any of them now, anyway :>
“And God Saw That It Was Good” – This was an essay I wrote for film class, about the movie Dark City. In it, I argued that the movie presented a call for atheism. It really didn’t, but that was how I perceived it. In a nutshell, I was angry that John wasn’t going to tell any of the survivors that they were on a spaceship. Instead, he just set himself up as God and remade the City the way he wanted it. I felt that this was a metaphor for the Christian god. Obviously I had some issues at the time. Written in 2000.
“Self-Reliance” – This was an essay for Advanced Writing about Thoreau and Emerson, I think. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything interesting. (This may be the essay where I basically lashed out at my professor’s “go into the woods to find yourself” ideals.) Written in 1999.
“Shaw and Feminism” – This was my review of George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession, for English Lit. In it I basically said that Shaw was not preaching feminism with this play, as my professor would have had us believe. As I recall, I had some pretty compelling arguments, but I don’t remember what they were. (Can you tell I enjoyed contradicting my teachers?) I think this was written in 2000.
“A Call for Equality” – I have no idea what this is, but it sounds boring, doesn’t it? It’s probably a literature review.
“Horrible Responsibility” – I’m gonna guess this was another literature review…but this may possibly have been written for Human Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 2000. Not sure. (Come to think of it, the previous essay might have been for that class, too. Who knows.)
Journal Entries
All of these journal entries were written while I was in college at UK.
“The Way It Is” – This might have been about infertility. I don’t remember.
“On writing and fame” – You’ve seen me talk about this enough in this journal!
“Paranoia; or, an average day in the life” – This one was interesting. I was sitting on the floor in Whitehall Classroom Building on UK campus, writing in one of my notebooks, and I started to get this really paranoid feeling. I have an overactive imagination sometimes, so I started coming up with things that might happen to me, and how I might defend myself. Then I wrote about it.
“On being barren” – Now this was definitely about infertility. It’d be kind of nice to see what I had to say back then. I think I remember it, vaguely. It was what I wrote right after my first endocrinologist told me how high my FSH levels were. I wrote something like this:
“I didn’t want to have a baby right now,” I told Sean on the phone later that night. “But–“
“But you wanted to know that you could,” he finished for me. I love him so much.
I wrote this poem in the same sitting as that journal entry.
“Life for Dummies” – This was just a short, cute little thing I wrote as a reaction to the Today show. An Asian woman was interviewing someone about economics and acting like a ditz, so I wrote about how next they’d be hawking a book called Life for Dummies. There was a guy I met doing night desk in the dorms…I forget his name, but I thought he was very cool. He wrote essays for the school paper arguing Palestine’s side. Anyway, I showed him this essay one day at the Ho and he thought it was funny.
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And that’s not all I ever wrote, not by a long shot! There were plenty of short stories and college essays that I didn’t put online, either because they weren’t finished or because I thought they sucked. There were also the Ninja Turtle and Darkwing Duck stories I wrote in middle school, which only existed in hardcopy (they were originally on 5-1/4″ Apple II floppies, but I have no idea what happened to those. There was also a story about a girl named Gwendolyn who got sucked into another world on those floppies; I don’t think I even had a copy of that story at the apartment). I also remember writing a story about a mystery in Venice when I was in third grade–that may still exist, actually, at my parents’ house.
So while I certainly haven’t been as prolific as some people, I did lose quite a bit of writing in that stupid fire.