Valuable Lessons

The first story I had ever written was while I was in Jr. High. I had a great idea to write a story about a young woman who went to another world when she dreamed, and the working title was 'Harganoph and the Tree of Life.' In the story, a teenager named Marie would project into another reality in her dreams. This other world was a place with magic and adventure called 'Harganoph.' One night, she finds that she doesn't wake up from her dream. In fact, she's stuck in Harganoph. She's informed by a scientist that her living body must have slipped into a coma and she needed to get back to that body before she dies. Marie and a group of her friends start their journey to the Tree of Life, which is supposed to have the magic needed to bring her back to her real world, but as she finds the fantasy more appealing than reality, she starts to doubt if she even wanted to be saved at all.

Computers weren't as easy to come by back then, so I typed the story on school computers and saved them on a floppy disk. I never spent recess with kids my age since I was one of those lonely kids with no friends, but it was alright because I had a dream and I was fulfilling it in those hours at the library. I made a lot of progress and made it to almost 100 pages before High school.

By the time I was in high school, computers were more common. I had one at home that the family shared, but due to the toxicity of my home at the time and because of how busy things were, I could never write at home. As technology got more advanced, so did the writing systems on the school computers. Freshman year, I learned my first three valuable lessons. The first one was to save in .rtf format so you can open up your stories on nearly every program. The second was to not save on a floppy disk. The third was to save in multiple places in case something happened to one or more files.

After two years and 100 pages of this story, the file was unreadable to any computer I tried after the update. The second time I tried, the file was nothing but jumbled-up letters and symbols. It was gone and I was so distraught that I abandoned that story completely. I did keep the fantasy world's name, however, and to this day all my fantasy stories take place in a world called Harganoph.

There were more lessons learned from my second story, 'Glorious Atlantis.' I was more than 200 pages through when my laptop was stolen by someone who broke into our house. I was working on the story before the family went out for dinner, so when the robber took my laptop, they also took my story with them. Luckily, I had printed 150 of those pages for editing and a teacher who heard what happened graciously volunteered to re-type the 150 pages I had printed so that I could keep writing.

Even though that project eventually got abandoned as well, it still exists in some form thanks to the lessons I learned from 'Harganoph and the Tree of Life.' It has been the only story I ever lost, but the sacrifice of that story is why I've been able to save every story I have today, including the ones that eventually got published. I will always remember my first story, and though there is no longer any written proof of its existence, it will always live on in the lessons I've learned.