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A science fiction novel I finished and published (with the help of the press that I was an unpaid intern at) around mid-2022, though I believe work on it started sometime in 2020. It's had a variety of changes in direction since its initial conception (corresponding to my volatile interests as a young teenager), though I can firmly place it time-wise at the height of my fascination with astronomy. I think it's interesting to see how some of my personal philosophies at the time developed near the end of the book (the last few chapters in particular really remind me of the extremely short story "Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable" I wrote a few years later).
I spoke quite disparagingly of this novel in the past. While I don't think the criticism was unwarranted I also do feel like I was quite unfair to myself. That said, this excerpt from a reflection I wrote about two months after completing it does provide some good insight:
I have a love-hate relationship with it. It's important to understand some context; originally it was never planned to be a written work, let alone a novel. Its first "official" iteration was a project I had to do as part of college training-- a "podcast" of sorts-- narrated and written chapter-by-chapter. I have no idea if it aired.
Due to the work's "episodic" nature, I wrote it less as a continuous story, and more like little moments of characters' lives that would piece together to form the larger narrative. I had about 8k words down in this format, before I ended up changing the college prep program I was with. This program wanted me to turn it into a novel, not a narrated podcast. I spent some time reworking the older content I had on hand, but I decided to keep the "pieced-together" nature of the work; I liked it and felt it could convey the lives of regular people in a difficult situation better than a continuous narrative would.
The final version of the work was more-or-less rushed to meet a deadline as I had to have something of substance in my college applications. That alone means it was probably not my best production. In early 2022 this was especially true; I had around 10-15k down and was trying to meet a target of 50k. Being a high school student trying to keep up his grades, it was a whole load of stress. Every so often, I'd-- for lack of better terminology-- vomit out whatever I could to pad the word count a little bit.
In the "rush months" where I had my last chances to up my grades before summer, I took a rest and didn't work on it as much. I picked it up over the summer and that was when it gained the most momentum. At that time, I also realized that everything I wrote here-and-there was pretty much trash (as filler usually is) and had to be redone; that was also a hasty job, but at the very least the new iterations were much more thoughtful.
By summer I was working almost daily on the manuscript (at some point, I felt sick just thinking about the word "manuscript"). All the while, I had other things to deal with: a relationship I wasn't happy with, SAT prep, and a whole bunch of projects on the side, both for my own entertainment and for college applications. I couldn't get my focus together and I exploited bursts of inspiration I had here and there to write chapters of the book. Thus, I'd write everything out of order; whatever came first was whatever I felt like writing.
For the most part it worked well. There was only one issue: I had no idea what the proper order was supposed to be.
Yes, I didn't have a storyline planned-- I'll get to why in a moment, but I had to spend a very long time moving the blocks of text around like pieces of jigsaw puzzles trying to figure out what goes where.
[...]
Also, when you're young, you're impressionable and usually download whatever cool new thing you just saw into your mindset. For that reason, the plot was constantly changing directions-- first it was an exploration into the morality of a character who wasn't even mentioned by name in the final copy, then it was an Earthbound-esque alien contact scenario where the power of love saves the day, then it finally started looking more like the way it was now-- except everything still was changing.
The novel is indeed not a work that I consider myself particularly proud of, and most of its issues do stem from the poor structure and pacing. Nevertheless, I do consider it a significant accomplishment and quite foundational to my voice as a writer. I think it might be worthwhile to revisit this work in the future and rewrite it and potentially re-introduce a lot of ideas I originally had that were cut out. One such idea that was cut was to have the protagonist undergo neurosurgery that would end his dependence to substances but would leave him unable to feel happiness as a result, which I think is interesting. I do wish I had kept a more comprehensive archive of my initial ideas and drafts, for this reason.
The novel has around 50k words, but should go by pretty quick due to the brevity of the chapters.
A rudimentary text-based game I made with Twine around early-mid 2023 for my high school's Capstone project. Going through the slideshow writeup I made for the project, I do find it interesting how my desire to make video games, and the reason behind that desire, has remained the same (at least, as of now in mid-late 2026). Here's what I wrote on the slideshow in response to the question "How is this topic meaningful to you?" that I find still rings mostly true for me:
The topics that I found interesting then, naturally, are a little different than what I find interesting now. Despite that, I didn't expect my approaches to media and its creation to have remained so consistent. The actual game, though, does feel a little bare. As far as I'm aware there wasn't really extensive documentation surrounding the game's creation, so I am left wondering what about the writing supposedly took so long when it doesn't seem like there's that much in the game. Compared to Event Horizon, I didn't even speak of it much after I completed it. I think this was something I sort-of just made and then forgot about. Nevertheless, I think it deserves to be archived here for being what is technically my first-ever video game.
The game is very short and should not take more than two hours to complete. It originally had background music, but the files were a bit cumbersome to host so they have never been replaced.