Those of you who’ve followed me for a while know I’ve been doing this writing thing since I was a teenager. That’s pretty damn close to a decade and a half now. You might also know I wrote my first novel as a teenager: I wrote the bulk of it in grade 10, before I got stuck, forgot about it for almost a year, then came back in my grade 11 year to finish it off.

Now, considering how many people say they want to write a novel, then write about half of it and give up forever, just finishing a full novel at age 16 is a pretty good accomplishment. Now, even then, I knew it wasn’t a great book. I knew it’d need some work. But I was, to put it mildly, quite naïve about just how much work it needed. I mean, apart from a few short stories, it was basically the first serious thing I’d ever finished.

And so, time went on, and the book receded into memory. I wrote a sequel the next year, in grade 12; it was supposed to be a five-book series, but only the first two were ever written. If I remember right, when I sat down to write book 3 in my first year of University, I ran into some serious plot hurdles that kept me stuck for quite a while. And then, as time went by, and I moved on to newer projects, I started seeing flaws. Serious flaws. Flaws so gapingly gigantic that I questioned if it was even worth working on these books anymore.

At that point, I put those old teenage novels on the eternal back-burner. There’d always be fond memories—those two books were lots of fun to write, and the second was the easiest book I’ve ever written—but I wasn’t going to seriously attempt to publish them. Hell, I didn’t even look at them for years.

Until now, that is.

Recently, as I was in the middle of another I’ll never make it funk, I decided to dig that old teenage novel out from the depths of my files. The Book of Secrets, it was called; I opened up the Word doc, which hadn’t been edited since 2016, started reading…and before I even hit page two, one big fact hit me plain in the face.

This book is crap.

And when I say crap, I mean crap. Pretty much everything in The Book of Secrets is absolutely terrible. The characterization is super inconsistent, and basically just serves the whims of the plot. The descriptive writing, when it’s there at all, is awful. The plot makes little sense; the worldbuilding makes less. And the dialogue…good heavens, the dialogue. I’ve always thought I was decent at dialogue, but what we get in The Book of Secrets makes the Star Wars prequels at their worst seem like Shakespeare. None of the characters talk like an actual human being.

I will say this for The Book of Secrets, though: it did give me some laughs. Some of the decisions Jeffery Johanski (the main character) makes, and some of the things he says, are so bafflingly stupid that I actually couldn’t breathe, I was laughing so hard. How could I have written this—any of this—and thought it was good?

But then, you know, a few things hit me. First, this was the first novel I’d ever written: it’s rare to try something and be good at it immediately. Second, while the book is undoubtedly, undeniably, irredeemably terrible, there are a few moments here and there that suggest I at least have some inkling of what a novel is supposed to be. There are a few bits of foreshadowing that are executed OK. The book’s climax isn’t pulled off that terribly (I mean, how we get there is kind of nonsensical, but once we’re there, it’s paced decently, there’s at least a little sense of stakes, and a few subplots from earlier in the book actually pay off somewhat).

And then third—and maybe most important—it showed me all the work I’ve put in since I started writing has actually paid off. I read a short section of one of my recent novels to my girlfriend recently, and the difference is night and day. I mean, yeah, my current writing could still use improvement, but it’s miles ahead of The Book of Secrets.

Heck, even the sequel, The Goppling Donhikers, was better (and I promise, if you read The Book of Secrets, the title of book 2 would make sense). Make no mistake: The Goppling Donhikers is still pretty bad. But I’m reading through that one now, and, well…it’s better. The dialogue isn’t quite as weird and alien. The pacing is a bit better. The characters act with a bit more consistency. There are still a few laughable moments, but they’re not nearly as frequent as in book 1.

And here’s another thing: I never edited book 2. All my editing efforts were focused on the first book. Which means even the first draft of book 2 was better than the “polished” version of book 1.

Reading through The Book of Secrets again has done a few things. First, I had a lot of fun going back and reading through that first book, even if it was awful. It let me not only laugh at myself, but also reminisce about those days in my parents’ computer room, typing away, hungry to finish this story that was raging to come out. And then second, it was another reminder of how far I’ve come. My more recent books—books like The Ravage, Kosan, and the ever-unfinished Usi 1—might still not yet be publishable, but they’re a hell of a lot closer than The Book of Secrets. And hey; if I ever do finally get over the publishing hill, and I get a few people reading my stuff, maybe I’ll do a few readings from The Book of Secrets. Just to give tomorrow’s young writers some hope. Say something like “hey, this is how bad I was when I first started. Don’t give up.”

That being said, I don’t regret writing The Book of Secrets for a second. That book, and its sequel, were a lot of fun to write. They proved, then proved again, that I could actually write a full novel from beginning to end. And they were a necessary step on the journey; everyone’s gotta start somewhere.

No, if there’s a book I regret writing, it’s Invaders, my third (and maybe worst) teenage novel. But that’s another story…

Anyway, that’s all for now. As always: have fun, stay safe, keep reading.