Funny thing happened yesterday

My friend Corin, from my comp class came over to work on our latest papers. She has to completely rewrite hers... I do not. I made a few changes to mine, and it's good to go. My rough draft was good enough, in the teacher's eyes to not warrant a total rewrite, so I had it much easier than Corin. We got to talking about our in class writing assignment, and it led to discussing how I thought I could probably write a book on the topic she gave us, I was just full of ideas for this assignment! I said something like "I should probably finish the first novel before I start a second" and Corin wanted to know what I was talking about. I told her about the "book" I started writing in study hall my senior year. She asked if I still had a copy of it, and I do, it's in my trunk, with my other school memorabilia, and wedding mementos. She pretty much demanded that I drag it out and let her read it. She said "If your writing is this good now, I want to know if it was this good back then, or if you just sort of started pulling good stuff out of the air recently!" So as I was sitting there working on a jump start to our assignment for Tuesday, she read through the 'thing' I wrote 16 years ago.
I hadn't thought about it in years, and here she was reading through it, asking questions about it, and it amazed me how much of it I remembered. She was pretty impressed with it, and decided that I must have always had some ability in the writing department, because even back when I was a goofy kid, I was a pretty good writer (her words, not mine!). It just sort of got me thinking about it though. I wonder how much it would suck to try to pull that thing out and have another go at it. I'd have to completely rewrite it, to get it onto my computer, I don't have a disk anywhere with it, just about 60 pages of it printed out from an old computer, back in the day when the pages were all connected, and had those tear-away edges with the holes in it to pull it through the printer. Some of it is still hand written on tablet paper. I even found the ORIGINAL that I started with back in study hall. Part of me doesn't want to touch it, it belongs in the past, and I think that if I started going back over it, I would discover that it's not as great as I thought it was back then. Plus there's the age factor. I wrote that when I was 18, started it the day before my 18th birthday, actually; now I am a 33 year old wife and mother, and this story is very teen oriented, could I still write like that, still feel connected to that era of my life? I worry that anything I would add to it now would make it feel choppy, like a reader could tell "this first part is different from the end... Like it was written by two different people" because it is... I don't know what to do with it. I almost wish Corin hadn't opened up this particular can of worms.

I talked to JP today online. He asked me to hook up my webcam, I wish he could have gotten his done, too, but it was late at night there, and his roommate was sleeping. I miss his face. He's heard that his R&R might possibly be coming in September, but until I have a flight number, I'm not making any plans. Really, any time from September on would be great, since the end of September is the halfway point. We celebrated "Half Way Day" on June 22nd, that was the half way point of the whole deployment... The end of September is the half way point of the "over there" part. We wanted his R&R to be towards the end, so we have it to look forward to longer, and when it's over, it's almost time to start getting excited about him coming home. I sort of wish his R&R could happen around Christmas time, for the kids mainly. I want him home everyday, any day, but the kids would love to have their Daddy home for Christmas break. Otherwise I think I'd be tempted to pull them out of school a lot while he's here. Oh, then there's my classes to consider, too. It doesn't matter really, whenever he comes home will be the perfect time.

I should get off my butt and get going on the list I made this morning, I have things to do. But it's a lazy day, and I just don't feel like it.