Usually, when I start mucking out my room, I find the old print outs of my fic and my fanart (from high school). I tend to just go "Old shame! Old shame!" and move on. This morning, I decided to read a bit. I guess I wanted to do some literary analysis on myself or something.

The big thing I noticed is just how much I wanted to be clever, or be seen as clever. This writing was for another author's 'verse, and I knew she was a better writer than I was, so I needed to stuff my writing with in-jokes and canon shout-outs and Clever Over Thinking. (PROTIP: If your Clever Over Thinking needs the character to have a one or two paragraph aside in order to talk about said cleverness, then it's probably not that clever. Or necessary.) I still have fits of wanting to make readers go "I see what you did there," but I think I've got it under control. A bit. (Then I do something like "Hacking the Gibson" where people had to look at my cleverness and then... yeah.) Another bad habit I still have is not finishing anything. From my epic Mary Sue to Mercverse arcs and Fanfic 100, all of my fics are works in progress.

I thought about posting up bits for everyone to see, but I feel icky about it. It isn't about the rambly turns of phrase or the fact that the perspecitve (original) character sounds like me in high school (PROTIP: If a guy in his twenties sounds like a bitter teenage high school girl, someone's doing something wrong.), it's more about the fact that the author's still known for this 'verse, and said author and I are on terms of denial. You know, where the parties go along like the other did not exist.

Obviously, I'm not keeping up my part of the bargain. I don't think I can, really. The whole experience, as cliché as it sounds, made me what I am today.

Know what? Fuckit. Old shame time. Of course I'm going to cherry pick for the bits that I'm not too embarassed to post. That's how I roll.

( Bootleg analysis is bootleg )