old ghosts

[swan_tower]

There's something deeply odd about revisiting a text you wrote when you were fifteen, with an eye toward revising it into something worthy to see the light of day now. (I might have been sixteen, but I don't think so. Certainly I was in high school.) It's not purely craptastic, though it comes close; large chunks of it are getting deleted without a second thought. But I had a few worthwhile turns of phrase, buried in amongst the chaff. And the idea still has some compelling force, which is why I'm revisiting it in the first place.

Should this end up seeing the light of day, it will displace Doppelganger as my earliest idea to successfully reach print. I can only think of one other thing that stands even a faint chance of defeating this for that title, and that one thing will be so heavily modified by the time it does so that it would only barely qualify as the same idea I had when I was fourteen.

Still. Kee-rist. I was fifteen when I thought this up. If I thought it was weird admitting I wrote Doppelganger when I was nineteen, this would be substantially worse.