Nostalgia Reel
Emotionally, it's been a rough week. I'm still mentally hungover from last week's goodbyes, and I let myself get maybe too entrenched in some of the bad things going on in the world (see: RNC, the horrific Twitter assault on Leslie Jones, etc). I've been going through the work day in a haze and, creatively, my drive has been completely shot. But throughout the week I've been making slow steps towards improvement. Mostly by stepping backwards.
Most of my time away from work this week has been spent on old favorites, re-imaginings of old favorites, and trying to revive old favorites. The re-imaginings come in the form of Ghostbusters and Star Trek Beyond, both of which I had an amazing time watching and will probably see again in-theaters. And anyone who knows me knows that I tend to be most invigorated creatively by new movies. There's something about leaving a theater after living in that other world for two hours that makes me want to create my own worlds. And when I wasn't at the theater this week, I was re-watching Pacific Rim at home. This definitely tends to be a love it or hate it film, but Pacific Rim is very near and dear to my heart. In a lot of ways, it's the film that jump started my writing after a long hiatus.
Specifically, re-watching Pacific Rim took me back to my fanfiction. Now, let's be clear - I've been writing fanfiction on and off for a very wide array of shows and books and movies since I was 13. Much of that has been graciously lost to time and the void. But about three years ago I started writing fanfiction again for Pacific Rim. And then I took a break and started writing fanfiction again about a year after that for Transformers in several variations. It's been a very long time since I've written any new fanfiction. But watching Pacific Rim again made me curious enough to revisit some of my older work. And I was actually pleasantly surprised by what I found.
I re-read everything. Everything I had posted under my most recent fanfiction pseudonym. Everything that was clearly posted too quickly and without enough of an editing eye. Everything that was written on a whim or a dare or bits of conversation with other fans. I even went through and read the parts that never got posted. This piece of a second chapter and that bit of an unfinished follow-up. And that spurred me to re-read one of my own stories. One that I started over a year ago and abandoned. And you know what I realized?
I'm pretty fucking good at this.
And when that thought first crossed my mind, I felt cocky and egotistical for it. Like I didn't deserve to think highly of my own work. And then I thought about it a little further and realized...if I don't like what I'm writing, what's the point? It's a good thing to enjoy your own work. That's not to say that I don't suffer very regularly from the writer's inevitable self-doubt, but this was the first time in a while that I realized I'm actually good at this writing thing. And maybe it's not so crazy to think that if I finish something, people will want to read it. And that was exactly the kind of pick-me-up I needed this week.
So while I contemplate finishing up a few of these dusty old fanfics, tell me: have you ever gone back to an abandoned project and realized you're pretty fucking good at something, too?
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