In wanting to clean up alan-one a bit, I took a look this morning at my Nephite pages, which I haven’t done in a very long time. About half the pages on the Book of Mormon Adventures section were completely broken, which have probably been that way for a year or so. The tables weren’t even in the database, which is pretty horrible of me. I did some preliminary cleanup as much as I can, everything up until actually cleaning up the db structure and porting it to postgres or sqlite instead of mysql.
Working on it sure brought back some memories, though. I really love that little site, and all my projects in general. They were pretty much the first real public works I ever worked on. I hate the fact that I’ve been neglecting them for years, especially since it’s always been something in the back of my mind that I wanted to come back to and properly clean up.
One thing I had completely forgotten about was two short stories that I wrote, a long time ago. My first one was Gadianton’s Bandit, which I wrote on my mission, I believe … I’m not real sure of the exact timeline, but I know it was either right near the end or right after my mission. I do remember how I started writing it though.
Near the end of my mission, I was in the city of Neuquen (the province of Neuquen, in Argentina). For some reason, I got the idea to start writing a short story in my very limited free time, probably just as another measure to keep my sanity in a pretty stressful time. I started writing a short fantasy novel for another odd reason, and while it was a lot of fun, I had the hardest time coming up with a storyline that would fit and make sense. The writing was a lot of fun, but getting the story was near impossible. I made countless changes. I kinda gave up on the idea in frustration, and moved on after a few days. But then one morning I was reading my Book of Mormon and I read Helaman 11:33, which talks about the Gadianton robbers carrying away many people. I thought to myself, “Hmm, that would make a cool basis for a story,” and the idea persisted.
I ran with the idea, and this time, the story just came to me really quickly and I manged to get it all down really fast. Just like my (very old) poetry, my writing style is kinda similar to a stream of conciousness … I kind of just write the ideas as they come to me, with a general idea of where I’m going, and then after I’m done I make very few if any edits. So the story you’ll see on my website is probably pretty darn close to the original that I wrote so long ago. I haven’t read it again, yet. It’ll bring back too many memories and emotions. Those were some hard, but very good times.
I wrote a second one, which I completely forgot about … or rather, I knew I had started another one, but I didn’t think I finished it. I guess there is a third one somewhere in my archives. The second one is A Division Among the People, this time about the evil king Noah, and some things going on around him. You can read the actual account in the Book of Mormon in Mosiah 11 to 19. I like that one.
I need to get back into writing some more. The stories obviously are not great quality, but it was a lot of fun, and a faith-promoting experience.