Lords of Chaos | You thought your youth was fucked up?
1993-current | 93-99 actual | 96-00 dev revision A. | dev revision B is pending.

Abstract

When I say that my teen years were a turbulent mess of pyschic goop, I mean it. Reality has since calmed itself down considerably by virtue of figuring out how to deal with things on my own terms. Back in the day, before I figured any of this out, I "forked" my life between fictional and actual, and used the fictional bits as a sort of free-fire zone by which to make sense of it all. Eventually, something incredibly odd happened- I met one of the characters that had, until that point, been totally fictional. Fucked with my head a bit, that did- hence the suspension of dev. revision A.

When I say this material is old, I mean it is old. Dated. Antiquated. The material contained here does not reflect my present writing style at all, to put it mildly. I'm better. Probably more typo-ridden, as I've since learned to touch-type, but better regardless. I'm also a lot less prone to dipping my psyche into whatever is wandering around and channelling it out through words. Which, while this makes me less prone to "spontaneous" creativity of the weird sort, gurantees that whatever I produce these days isn't something I'm going to look back on in a few years and think "huh?".

More practice than anything else, most of what's here could be considered "work files", as none of it is in a complete state and some of it flat-out makes me wonder about the state I was in when I wrote it.

I'm also wondering what crack Office has been smoking, as it apparently doesn't like converting .rtf to .html. So some of this has been munged in the formatting. My typwritten journal salvage from the NCR and the 520 is a mess- a psychic mess of blurry lines. I can't really tell the difference in some cases, with regards to what's fiction and what's not, and it's probably a good thing. Yay self-actualized adjustment! This isn't everything, by a long shot- it's the stuff that I could easily and quickly filter out from everything else and slap together.

Mainly because I know somebody is going to read it.
Which, generally speaking, is sufficient motivation to not put it up, but you get the idea.

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Appended to the original abstract:

So this thing is more or less up and trying to roll in some direction, which may or may not be a good thing. What we have in "past tense" is things as percieved at the time- a time in which I was still getting my shit together, largely an asshole, and generally somewhat undereducated and highly influenced compared to present time.

Then there's also the fact that I don't really consider myself a writer, and a lot of what's in Past Tense was written while I was still figuring out the plot details for whatever piece in question, which is why some of it stops abruptly. I don't consider anything in past tense to be a reflection on my present capacity as a writer- I suck, but I sucked more in the past. Live with it, and judge that pile of smelliness accordingly.

What's lurking back there in the past could be best considered a developmental alpha- snapshots of the early development stage while still in very close proximity to the source material that has inspired the project.

So don't take it as anything else.