The Stars and the Cookie Jar

....I think that was probably for Petros.

Well, in my absence, my sister borrowed my Aeneid for her summer reading, but I'm going to cadge it back. Since I have four projects going on at once now -- the revised Vilna Stories, the Vilna Translations, the Russian History AU and the Continued Assault on Aeneas -- I've been thinking a lot of the nature of writing. One of my closest friends is becoming famous -- Google her and you get more than a page -- and I have an eye to being somewhat famous myself.

One of the last nights of my vacation, we stayed up way too late talking of our early work. I got to skewer a piece of hers -- first time I had ever found anything to skewer at all, ever -- which was deeply amusing, but sort of sank a little when I realised I'd no way for her to return the favor (and I had so many of those cleverly-cut little veggies left over from making literary kebabs). She has things of mine I no longer possess; but it came to me that nowhere do I have copies of my own work predating (Er, that's "coming before," not "stalking and eating") early 2000, when my undergrad thesis and the first drafts of the Vilna stories were taking awkward flight.

Of course I wrote before this; I've been filling spiral notebooks since I was old enough to buy them. But the notebooks are gone, and I can't remember what I used to be like, on paper. Probably highly derivative and melodramatic, with patchy dialogue; but it's so frustrating that I can't know. Somewhere in all those notebooks, there might have been a seed.

Oh, and you'll never guess. I started out a poet.

Yup. The first semester at the high school for fine and performing arts was focused on prosody -- the trick of formed poetry -- and it's where I gained my little obsession with meter.