I‘m going to start doing these blog post series as a way to record my memories somewhere. I always live a little in fear that time will erase my first 13 years; I rely a lot on what’s inside my head and the thought of someday losing it all is a little distressing.
I think I got my first computer when I was around eleven years old. Before that, I had been doing a lot of writing and tinkering around with my dad’s computer (since he moonlighted as a computer tech along with his engineering job). A distant uncle had left behind an old computer, so my dad cobbled together this thing that only had like 1 gb of hard drive space. I could only install one new-ish game on it at a time.
Man, I loved it. Not for the games, but because of Microsoft Word. Borrowing the computer from my dad was risky business…is he going to be busy today? Will he let me? With my own computer, I could write any time I wanted to. And I could have my own backgrounds! It was heaven.
I went on a writing spree starting around this age. I’ve already finished my first full-length novel at this time (a dog adventure story of some sort), so now I started working on two or three projects at a time. I finished at least another novel during this time, maybe two (one involved an anime-esque novel with a group of teenagers). Since I barely got out of the house and there wasn’t a lot of entertainment (no Cable TV, not many books, no library or too many video games apart from the ones on a freeware CD my mom got from Taiwan, Petz by P.F. Magic, and Creatures by Millenium Interactive), this was all I did.
I also only had one mp3 CD, a bootleg compilation of various movie tracks. I listened to the Prince of Egypt non-stop while writing (I sometimes still do, for nostalgia’s sake). I think by the time I was 14 years old, I was typing at 120 WPM because of how much writing I did in those days.
It seems crazy that now, nearly two decades later and half a world away, I haven’t strayed that far from those habits.
