We're nearing the end of the 2010's. What does your oldest fic/chapter 1/prologue during this period look like compared to your most recent? Can you see the improvement, or do you feel like you're just treading water?

Post snippets or the whole chapters, spoiler tagged of course.

 

I started writing fanfiction in 2012, as much as I'd like to pretend the first account never existed. Apparently I still can't write a short story that will land with people, at all, but I've made substantial improvements in stories of the obscenely long variety. I'm able to write and be proud of what I've written for a longer period of time, which works out, since I don't care about any other metric.
I got my first real review in a year for my hp series from this Canadian who wants me to know that I've got at least one loyal reader.

 

In 2010, I was eighteen and still working on my 365k Pokemon fanfic. It could have been written better, and while I tried scrubbing it from the internet, I’m still rather fond of it. I learned so much from it, especially for writing characters and plots since I didn’t use canon main characters or plots, just the region. I only got halfway through the story, right before the good bits, before abandoning it in 2013. I outgrew it and I wanted to start an original book series.

The book took up the rest of the 2010s. I began in August 2014, and after many drafts, it was ready to be published in August 2019. I’m still currently looking for an agent, but since I’m moving across the continent in a couple days, it’s fallen a bit by the wayside.

In the 2020s, I hope to write many more books, let’s say four. Two the sequels to my current book and two unrelated books in different genres. I think I can pull this off. My first book was complicated to write and I didn’t quite know what I was doing, so now that I’m experienced, I’m confident I can greatly increase my output.

 

Interestingly enough i still have a copy of my first serious writing

Spoiler: screenshot

Its pretty garbage ngl, typos everywhere, no idea what even it is, is it a poem, a vignette, a short story? No fucking idea.

Inconsistent spacing, no capitalization anywhere really. Its a mess, I was always 10 so, I'll cut myself some slack.

And my entry for the Comp that I made too short and didn't feel like re-writing which is similar.

Spoiler

There once was a small wizarding family, who lived on the edge of a muggle town. The mother and daughter would peddle potions to the muggles, and the father and son would sell transfigured items, passing themselves off as craftsmen.

One day the King went to war, and with him went most of the able bodied men, they had hoped for a short war, and to be home before harvest spoiled, but they were not. The war dragged on, and the granaries were emptied, and the fields were barren.

The town began to empty, the people left, seeking food elsewhere, and as it emptied, the wizards had no one to sell to, and they slowly began to go hungry.

Fret not said the father, we are wizards something as simple as hunger won’t strike us down. We are wizards but what is more we are masters of Transfiguration.

He and his son summoned stones from the ground, and the bark from the trees, and they transfigured a grand feast, and they all began to sup. They ravenously devoured the meal in moments, and when the table began to become bare, and the became parched, the father and son called the dirt from the ground, and the wood from the abandoned houses, and only did this meal sate them, and it was left half eaten on the table.

They lived like this for three weeks, and three days exactly. On the third day of the third week, the daughter died. She had been sitting down to eat when all of a sudden she dropped dead. Her veins were full of wood.

The next night the mother died, her heart had turned to stone.

The son was next, his skin was covered with patches of bark.

The father was the last to die, and his corpse was naught but a pile of dirt.

And the story goes, the next day a man named Ebepdias Gamp, came into a town with a wagon of food, and the news that the war had ended, and found nothing but corpses.

Its better, but even though I show the most improvement in this thread, I don't think I really count lol, going from 10 to 18 has a way of dramatically improving your writing.