#in the continuing saga of me being a dick to my roommate for no reason lol

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i know im extremely quick to assume someone's being condescending towards me or taking me for a fool and ever quicker to get pissed about it but goddamn some people make it way too easy

[fanfoolishness]

My First Words: space orphans!

At 14, in 1998, I wrote my one and only completed attempt at a novel.  Cia (short for Philocia) Trenn was a young upstart space orphan, living on an orphan ship.  This introspection is for @thesecondsealwrites‘s My First Words event, where we find our old writing and marvel at how far we’ve come. :)

Her name was Philocia Trenn, but her nickname was Cia.  She had dark red hair, most of it pulled back with a Mydreeni shell comb, with a thick piece of it hanging down by her face, secured at the bottom by a few Eranian glass beads.  Her eyes were clear, dark green with strange golden flecks throughout, a sense of roguishness playfully flickering through her eyes.  Her face was delicate and beautiful, but there was an underlying strength that even the casual observer could place.  She was strong and pretty, almost to the point of being breathtaking.  But not quite.

THANKS PAST SELF, GLAD WE KNOW WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE *facepalm*  I was so proud of that description, too.  Like, damn, golden flecks, glass beads, hell to the yeah!  Oh baby Gina.  I never made that mistake again, though, of lovingly describing my OC’s appearance so lavishly.  Or if I did, I broke it up into one trait every once in a while instead of this lovely opening paragraph...

Oh Cia.  She was a polyglot who knew a possibly impossible number of languages.  She was clumsy and hotheaded but fierce and brave, and when her orphan ship was sabotaged so the children would be used as subjects in brutal experiments, she fought her way out with her best friend, Krubbany Xass, a blue-skinned alien who could change colors based on his emotions.  He was a mathematical prodigy but very shy and deferred to Cia in just about every way.  I see now she was rather a bully to him, which I struggled with too; I was so possessive of my friends I would often be kind of a dick to them in efforts to hold onto them.  I didn’t realize that for a long time.

At first they were just best friends, but when I tried to rewrite the saga in college, they became love interests.  Not sure if I like that development or not now, I could go either way.  If it had somehow become a YA novel, you know that’s what would have happened.

Cia evolved into Seia when I realized her name could present pronunciation issues.  It’s pronounced “See-ah” when spelled Cia, but I thought it would be confusing, so I changed it to Seia to rhyme with Leia.  At various points in my life I attempted rewrites and so the original Cia story is no longer on my computer, but I found the original printout.  *evil grin*

Reading through this I’m amazed at how bad the dialogue is.  Dialogue is my JAM these days!  I love the shit out of it!  But back then, I guess I was still learning how it all worked.  Like, bad guys speak in this weird, bizarre, condescending tone (no matter who they are); there’s an awful lot of screaming and crying when Cia gets upset; everyone’s name gets repeated like 17 times a page in dialogue (to be fair, I was watching a lot of X-Files at the time and XF show writers were awful about that.  Try making it a drinking game sometime, you’ll be gone in the first two scenes Mulder and Scully are together).  And while @thesecondsealwrites struggled with writing out accents phonetically, I was busy making up my own awful languages, having adored Lord of the Rings and Star Wars novels.  Falla ba nee chii ko la banarest-keeli re?  Like what even is that?

I also forgot how it ends.  The experimenters wind up taking them back to modern day Earth?  There was some conspiracy where no one was supposed to know Earth still existed?  I don’t know how they explain away Krubbany being blue...  And then it’s just sort of over?  There’s no explanation for anything?  Oh my god this is terrible.  Sadly my plotting skills have barely improved.  It’s one reason why I usually write one-shots; I get a scene or an emotion, but I don’t know how to move characters from A to B, so I don’t bother.  I notice that I still usually want to put a conspiracy into everything I try to write as original fiction.  Because dammit, X-Files, I guess you permanently warped me.

Here’s part of the THRILLING ending:

Wrenderman let out a feeble laugh.  “Hee hee hee, the boy’s delirious!  That’s a stun beam, nothing more!  It could hurt me as much as an insect!”

Cia stood up next to Krubbany.  “Yes, but if that insect strikes enough times, it can be deadly,” she said in a grim, angry voice.

Krubbany pulled the trigger.  Whureesh!  Whureesh!

Wrenderman went limp as the yellow rays hit him.  Krubbany continued to fire until Cia held up her hand.  She walked silently to the prone form and felt for the pulse.  Nothing.

DID I REALLY NEED TO WRITE OUT ‘HEE HEE HEE’ FROM THE VILLAIN?  DID I, TINY PAST GINA?  Or “whureesh”?  I mean, to be fair, that’s a pretty cool noise.  I get it.  But maybe you don’t need to write it.  Maybe the reader could come up with their own version of “whureesh.”

OH NO THE SCARY INSECT oh man it’s bad.

I forgot about the weird pattern I had as a kid of making sure everyone got grievously injured at some point.  I just found it absurdly fascinating and enjoyable to make all of my protagonists almost die, and then to write out their injuries in gory detail.  Must have been that future doctor in me.

This is from the Krubbany prequel I attempted.  His name later changed to Khorrin because I was like “what the fuck kind of name is Krubbany???” later on, haha.

Arden turned from his position on the bed to face Krubbany. “You!” he said, obviously surprised. “Darn, I was hoping for somebody human. I’ve never ever gotten a good human roommate. Always stupid aliens-like you, I’m sure. Yes, I don’t see how someone who’s blue could be very smart. I’m sure it’s impossible.”

Actually the Ysamli were a very smart species. Many of them had the power of intuition, the power to see things in the future and the past. Several of the galaxy’s major inventions had come from Ysaml. And there wasn’t a single Ysamli living on Ysaml who hadn’t gone to college-Ysaml has the most colleges and academies of any planet its size. But, since Krubbany didn’t know all this, he couldn’t tell Arden off.

“I-I’m not stupid,” Krubbany said in slow defense. “I bet you’re the one that’s stupid.”

Poor Krubbany.  Never good at the comebacks.  Sorry about your space racist roommate, who was a dead ringer for Draco Malfoy before there was one.  Also this is clunky as fuck.

At any rate, that gives you the gist of my amazing space orphans.  Poor kids.  You deserved better than to be my 14-year-old self’s characters.  XD

But at least Seia Shepard lives on as my Paragon polyglot femShep <3