Embarrassing Early Stories

Yesterday I was at a Super Bowl party with several college friends of mine.  (I am not a huge fan of football but I do like the Super Bowl because it often involves friends, food, and drink.)  Shortly into the second half, I found myself in the kitchen with a few friends, one of whom mentioned she had recently purchased and read Hidden Worlds and had enjoyed it.

My host says, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to get that.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything of yours – probably that murder mystery you let me read was the last thing.”

My husband laughs and says, “She let you read the sex murder mystery?  She doesn’t let anyone read that.”

At this point I alternately want to melt into the floor and kill my husband.   “Was I drunk when I let you read it?” I ask.

“Probably,” he answers.

Some background.  I wrote a lot when I was younger, but when I got to college I took on two engineering majors and figured I was too busy to write, and so didn’t for several years.  Nanowrimo was invented, my friends started doing it, but I held off until 2003 when I woke up one day in early November with a premise and jumped into the insanity.  It was a murder mystery set on a cruise ship where they were filming a dating reality TV show.  There were a number of problems with it – 1) mystery, while I love to read it, is not my writing forte. 2) I did not and do not, to this day, know anything about reality TV shows.  3) It was the first novel I had attempted in five years.

Understandably it went into a drawer and has not come out.

There are some things that make this even more horrific than a normal first novel.   In the middle, my characters got away from me and decided that it was a good time for a sex scene.  It was not a concise sex scene.  If I remember correctly, it went on and on and on and eventually I just crossed the whole thing out (but left the words in, as it was Nano) and pretended it hadn’t happen.

The second thing that makes it horrific is that my roommate at the time had asked to be included – and I had relented – and this was someone that was also a friend of my Super Bowl host, so it’s entirely possible that he got to read not only a terrible sex scene, but one containing a mutual friend.

I still want to melt.  I am unsure how I desperately distracted the topic to something else.  Perhaps my friends sensed my embarrassment and graciously went along with whatever inanity I came up with to spare my feelings.

All stories teach us something, help us hone our craft, but I still can’t believe that I let that one out of the drawer for anyone to see.  Do you have any stories that you wouldn’t want out in the world?