I need to sleep but I need a little rant first. :P

I remember when I first decided I wanted to be a writer. I was eleven years old, and I thought Anne McCaffrey was the best thing I'd ever read or WOULD ever read; and I thought to myself, I want to make someone feel the way I feel now. I loved dragons, but more than dragons I wanted to write about music, and flight, and overcoming odds.

Sadly (sadly?), that last part hasn't changed.

But when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, all I knew about writing was that you had to spell things right, and that complete sentences weren't as important as elementary school teachers wanted you to think. When I was fifteen, I was a Good Writer, No Really.

Then at sixteen, I started sporking Mary Sues, and reading books about writing, and articles about writing.

It was good for me, in the long run: I needed to improve, and my ego was so swelled at that point that I couldn't. So I don't wish that I'd never read those essays, and I don't wish that I'd never looked critically at my writing. On the whole, I'm the better for it.

But there are some times when I look over my really, really old work, and I see my younger self doing good things--subconsciously, utterly unaware that they are good. Things that I can't do now without some sort of planning.

I feel like Lyra at the end of The Amber Spyglass. I hate having to relearn things I used to just know.