My senior year of high school I started writing a story I eventually titled Chances Are<\/i>. I put a lot of work into planning it, but I didn’t make too much progress on the actual writing<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Then I graduated from high school, quit my job at Menards, and spent five months on a hiatus from productivity.<\/p>\n
In those fives months, I worked on that story. I wrote. I planned. I spent time working on it every single day for months<\/i>. I put more work into that story than I’d probably put into all of my writing since I started as a kid.<\/p>\n
When I finally finished it, I was so proud. I felt so accomplished. And then I read through it and immediately started planning to rewrite it. At the time I didn’t think the writing was horrible<\/i> but I knew it needed a lot of work.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure how many times I tried to rewrite that story over the years before I finally put it to rest. It just wasn’t meant to be rewritten. It just needed to be taken for what it was: my first major writing accomplishment, packed in the archives.<\/p>\n
Chances Are<\/i> remains the longest story I’ve written and completed<\/i>. Aside from a handful of mediocre short stories, I haven’t finished anything since I wrote it. I’ve done a lot of writing in that time, but I haven’t finished<\/i> anything of that magnitude.<\/p>\n
Something made me think of that story recently. And part of me started thinking…I wonder if there’s a way I could still rewrite it<\/i>. Or possibly write an updated story of the characters today<\/i>. But then I pushed that crazy notion aside and promptly forgot about it. Because that’s what I do with everything<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking about rereading Chances Are<\/i>, just to see how awful the writing really is. I opened the file today and automatically saw a number of red squiggle lines. Apparently I didn’t do a proper spell check once it was done. So I decided to run one.<\/p>\n
Oh ye gods.<\/p>\n
Just doing a spelling and grammar check in Word broke my brain.<\/p>\n
And not just from Word’s asinine correction suggestions.<\/p>\n
Am it true?<\/i><\/p>\n
NO<\/b>, Word. It am not.<\/p>\n
I think I’ll still try to read the story. But it will take every ounce of restraint I can muster to not overhaul and make every correction I can find. A proper edit wouldn’t be a bad thing, but I’m pretty sure I would drive sporks into my eye sockets before the end of the second chapter if I allowed myself to edit as I read.<\/p>\n
It’s 111<\/i> pages long with an 8-point font.<\/p>\n
I might be crazy enough to try reading it.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My senior year of high school I started writing a story I eventually titled Chances Are. I put a lot of work into planning it, but I didn’t make too much progress on the actual writing. Then I graduated from high school, quit my job at Menards, and spent five months on a hiatus from productivity. In those fives months, I worked on that story. I wrote. I planned. I spent time working on it… Keep reading…Chances Are…<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":3,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,258,12],"tags":[226],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-endeavors","category-spell-check-is-drunk","category-writing","tag-226","content-layout-excerpt-thumb"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6787,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions\/6787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}