Of Balls

I've talked about it briefly a couple of times, but as I was considering a prompt a friend of mine gave me today for writing, I started realizing how grossly similar it was to a story I wrote a very long time - my first story, titled "The Power of the Balls." I mention that title every time I talk about it, because good lord, even at ten years old I knew it was an innuendo, and I stuck with it anyway. No one's going to read a story about the power of balls, past me. Not in any serious capacity.

I was obsessed with this story for a couple of years. It was my story. I had made it, and it was unlike anything that I had made before. It had a certain level of depth that I had never been able to achieve before, and I could share it with my friends and get them into it, after they laughed relentlessly at me for my dumb ass title. I played make believe games within the universe of my story, and my friends and I would go and fight giant imaginary monsters of all the different elements so that we could get their power balls (because I had never heard of an orb before apparently, which doesn't sound that much better, but is still better). And some of my friends would get mad at me for really stupid crap that really shouldn't have outraged them as much as it did, especially because it wan't even an original thing I was making and they ignored everything about what it was - but that's a different story.

I very distinctly remember what the document I wrote it on looked like. Not the story. But the document. My font was way too big, way too fancy, and way too green. I don't know why I made those decisions - probably because I was ten - but it was vomit inducing. And worse than that, the major conflicts of the story that I prided myself so much on - the large number of monsters and power balls that were threatening the world - were hardly conflicts at all. Multiple of them were defeated per page, and that was with how massive I made the text. In fact, I think multiple monsters were defeated per sentence, and that was before any of the main characters even had power balls to, you know, gain power.

I honestly can't write any more about it, because there wasn't anything more to it. It was a garbage story, with garbage pacing, and garbage ideas. I seem to recall the characters falling into some kind of hellscape where the monsters were from while trying to protect the world from them. What about the ones already in their own world? How did they get there? How were they going to get back? All excellent questions. None of which were answered. And I think that pretty much explains the whole problem.