Once tried my hand at writing a contemporary novel, you know just writing everyday stuff and goings-on among friends and family. the characters I wrote then were spun off from me and my friend's characters. In telling each character's story, I even used the first letter of our names (my sister Leslie was incorporated into the pseudo-novel as Leila, our friend Ebot can be identified in the story as 'Eunice', Gina was 'Gladys'. No one really got to read the manuscript, well except for one of my brothers, and my sister, Leslie who happened to find some sort of a kick in reading about some stuff there (part fiction but partly a sort of tell-all, too). And that was long before 'Gossip Girl' as we know it was even conceptualized. My friends, Gina, Ebot, Ben and Jessie, even my brother, Bingo, didn't even know I was writing about them albeit using aliases or now they could be the first 'avatars', come to think of it. Those characters in my book were but a semblance of who they are, just an alter-ego or something though I knew they'd probably recognize themselves once they read it. I do plan to show it to them once it's finished but it never did reach an ending..
I was just longing for that story, that same passion I once had for chronicling some of the events happening all around me and turning it into a fun contemporary fiction. I even tried going inside the minds of these people by writing about what I think they might be feeling based on my own perceptions. That initial attempt to write a novel was made during the pre-USB or flash drive days. The first few chapters of that were stored inside some diskettes in all its MS Word glory.(yes, kids, there actually was a thing called diskette then). Now, if only there is a
way to retrieve those diskettes now, so I could perhaps review or laugh at my unfinished book and possibly resume writing about all the things that have happened with all the characters there and then some. I'm pretty sure a lot of new characters would be introduced by now..
Well, I never got around to finish that book anyway as I got busy with other things, a lot of activities have since occupied my mind and time. I even fell in love, broke my heart, fell some more and well, before I knew it, I couldn't find the time to continue filling in those aborted chapters of my so-called novel. All those friends and people close to me whom I patterned my characters after also have gotten busy pursuing their own destinies and since then it has become harder for me to keep track of what they are doing, much less be in tuned to what they are feeling.
Sometimes, I am starting to wonder if I just suddenly stopped caring at all or maybe I just stopped writing that book because I started to live some more..
We can never tell, really. My life after all still has a lot of unwritten chapters in it.. and soon it will all be over (but I'm sure it will not end as a bit of entry inside a forgotten and lost diskette).
