Monday, January 6, 2014

Transcribing Crazy

We had been searching for a short story we wrote in 1995 for several years. We mentioned some of its content once in a blog post in February of 2011 (Franks First Love).
A couple of months ago Mother returned two plastic totes of stuff she'd had in storage for lord knows how many years. Stuff we hadn't even remembered we had, reeking of musty moldy old paper.
They turned out to be veritable time capsules, which included a 1999 screenplay adaption of a 1984 book called Virgins by Caryl Rivers that we did for fun - it had been a favorite book at the time. (We had even contacted her back then, she wouldn't give us "rights" to do anything with it, claiming she was writing an adaption herself. Still remains to be seen).

Anyway, in all these musty belongings was the story. Fifty cursive written pages of the first, and only complete, short story we ever recall writing.

Surprisingly we weren't as eager to page through it as anticipated, instead flipping to the back pages where we remembered that people who had read it in those days had written short "reviews". Raves of "excellent", "couldn't stop reading!" "very impressed" "gave me shivers".
Eleven people had read it and liked it.
Apparently it was easy to impress tenth grade high school students.

The story was so transparent in nature that a few of the readers knew exactly who the male character in the story was based on. Perhaps that's what made it more titillating to them.

Anyway, four months ago after being reunited with the document, we left it on the coffee table...and then put it in a drawer...or so we thought.
Somehow it had gotten misplaced the last few months while we were engrossing ourselves in University classes. It took quite the search today, which resulted in accidentally cleaning parts of the house, (Oh, the horror of accidentally cleaning!) but we finally located it.
Sitting down with a mug of coffee we started typing, cleaning up the horrifying grammar, the atrocious use of language, the repetitive sentences...and that was only into the fourth page...where we had to stop.

It seems that a page at a time, with breaks in between, will have to do for now.
Turns out we were fucking crazy, like, darkly fucked in the head. It's supremely disturbing that at the age of sixteen we wrote this story. By the fourth handwritten page the female protagonist had two vivid "hallucinations" about wanting to kill the boy that she had loved. The fuck. She totally makes us look sane.

Honestly though, it's also not written very well. Okay, it is written well for the first story of a sixteen year old. Reworking it a bit will help. WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY! (haha!)
Perhaps even expanding on it would be a fun task. One of the common themes in the reviews was that many who had read it would have liked a different ending.

Of course, since the man who the main character was based on hasn't been a complete stranger over the last few years, it could easily turn into a short novel at this point.

It still doesn't change how disturbing it feels to be transcribing the manuscript. Maybe it'll be a good drinking activity.

2 comments:

  1. I have poetry dating back to my high school days....and yes, the horrible grammar aside, the content makes me wonder often...I wasn't such a bad poet even back then...Hold on to the Time capsule. It will make your Children proud some day.. :) (AKA Mucky Sod!

    See that Frankie? I managed to make it back to your blog after all...lol

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  2. Children? No. Those won't be happening.

    Thanks for stopping back! :-)

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