I thought I lost you... (Patreon)

This is a surprisingly personal piece for me. So, the other day I cleaned up the traditional work space (see shiny photo! I have a digital work space too, not really impressive, but I'll get a photo of it when I clean it up).

While I was doing this, I came across a bunch of old flash drives. Most of them were ones I bought for work, and one of them was an archaic 256mb piece of crap that didn't work anymore. So I checked all of the drives for contents, and systematically copied what I needed onto the computer, and wiped them for future use.

But there was this one lone red flash drive that I only vaguely remembered. I popped it in and opened the contents. Lo and behold, there was the draft and supporting documents for the first book I tried writing.

When I was in high school I aspired to be a biologist and on the side, a writer. I've had a few stories bouncing around in my head with some pretty gratuitous detail, and this was the first one that was book length. 

I had last edited it in 2009, about 2 weeks before my dog at the time had died, and about 3 months before I headed off to college. I vaguely kept track of the documents for a while, but they've since gotten lost in piles of hard drives and old file folders on my old macbook. I mean, it's been 11 years, I figured those files were long gone. I completely forgot that I had backed it up.

So last night I opened it up, and began reading. Just bits and pieces here, by no means the whole thing. I had about 3/4 of the book finished, so it was over 300 pages. 

I totally expected to be peaking at it and cringing at my god-awful high school mind's writing skills. Surprisingly enough, it wasn't too bad, I actually snapped out of reading for a good hour or so. Who'd've thought? 

 Needless to say, it definitely smacked me with a bus-load of memories. So I ended up sketching the main character of the book out, with some very thrown together/concepty backgrounds of the area the book was depicted in. 

I'm not planning to release this book, but it was nice to look at that super developmental part of my life again, albeit through a sci-fi/fantasy book I was writing. Just to give you an idea of how important this guy was to me, his name happens to be Kigai.