I find myself in something of a predicament.
In light of the news that Wattpad is purging stories, I decided to hop to it and delete my account there before anything further happens. Better if I delete everything I had there on my own terms, I suppose.
Turns out, visiting my Wattpad account is a blast to the past, way back in 2015. Nearly a decade ago. From what I could tell from the publishing dates, I was active on Wattpad for about four months in summer, May to August.
My account is practically frozen in time.
In my profile, I still introduced myself (why did I use my real first name?), still made dry and blunt welcomes (my sense of humor back then was nonexistent), still made a list of songs I listened to (I cannot believe that little aspect persists even now).
There were four stories that I had written there on my account. Three stories published, one story forever confined in a draft. I recovered them all, saved the copies, then deleted them off the account, then deleted the account off Wattpad.
Here lies my predicament.
I could repost the stories on AO3, list them under a pseudonym in my account. After all, they were the first stories I had ever written and posted online, the first time I had ever tried to express myself in words instead of drawings. My words are my own.
On the other had, oh my god, the stories I wrote in 2015 are... embarrassing. It's coherent, and surprisingly enough I can pick out some absolute gems in the prose. But fuck if I knew how to keep the story cohesive, because it reads like a wandering transcription of my daydreams. Clearly I was more into the OC-self-insert melodramatic sensory imagery than actually telling a meaningful plot, and the plot was loose at best. And I wrote 52 chapters total of this stuff, which is bonkers. The main story I had was 46 chapters long, and I was entirely aware that on chapter 46 I was writing myself into a dead-end, but couldn't be arsed to change that. There was potential, I could see what I was trying to go for, I just typed the whole thing out in one go and didn't edit for shit. My words were my own, and I hoarded them all.
So. Yeah. I'm not sure what to do with these stories now. Should I archive, or should I not... I suppose I should be glad that my stories never received much attention at all, but I still do hold some fondness for them. After all, my words were my own, and a reflection of who I once was.
Maybe one day I'll rewrite the whole thing, and then post the original copy afterwards.
