My “First” Novel

Aleah and Sundance 2006

I should preface this by saying that I love Xena. I first discovered Xena when I was five years old. My mom found an old rabbit-eared television set at the dumpsters and brought it into the bedroom I shared with my brother. I woke up, and as a treat I was allowed to watch something on the “new” tv. That show was Xena, and I fell in love. For three years Xena dominated my life, influencing the games I played, the dreams I had, and the movies I sought out. Then, my mom cut the cord of our tv and I turned to books instead. 

Fast forward to eighth grade. I moved to a new city, with a new school away from my friends, and fell into depression. To distract myself I spent all of my time at the local library, where I checked out mountains of books every week. One day I was browsing the DVDs, and I found the first three seasons of Xena. I checked them out, and rekindled my obsession. 

Suddenly everything revolved around Xena. I spent my art lessons drawing Xena’s legendary weapon, the Chakram, on everything. I signed every diary entry with a prayer that a Xena movie would be made. I spent my library time finding novels about Ancient Greece and Rome (Xena gets a little fuzzy with the ancient timeline). There was very little about Ancient warrior women, so I looked for novels about the Amazons- the mythological warrior women who lived independently of men. I found three, and devoured them too quickly. There was an alarming lack of novels about Amazons, and I decided to fix that. 

That’s how “Kali” was born. I spent hours searching for Greek names, reading about the plains of Turkey (where I thought the Amazons lived) and then I started typing at a computer that was already considered a dinosaur in 2004. I spent all summer on my novel, weaving in Greek Gods, backstabbing best friends, and a trip to the underworld. I dreamt about Kali and her travels, and found comfort in my writing. What would have been a very lonely summer became three months of creation and distraction. 

When I finished, Kali was a little over 100 single-spaced pages, easily the longest thing I’d ever written, and definitely a bestseller (in my eyes). I pressed save for the final time right before I started High School. 

And then my computer died. 

This was how I learned to back my files up. I had no excuse, it was the last days of the floppy disk, and my mother had a pack of purple see-through floppy disks near her computer. She would have given me one if I had asked, but I didn’t, and my flawless piece of art was lost forever. 

I carted the carcass of that computer around for a decade in hopes that someone could fix it and recover my masterpiece. Then, during a deep clean of our storage closet, I stared at the massive computer (the monitor was long gone) and asked myself if I really wanted to read the actual “Kali” draft. 

The answer was a resounding “no.” In my mind, Kali is a perfectly formed gem of a story with a complete beginning, middle, and end. I know my writing as a fourteen year old, and it was cringey and overdramatic. There’s no way that the actual draft is anything like the story I remember writing. So I decided to get rid of the computer, and keep my memory unblemished.

It’s better this way.