Reading My Old Writing | The Overlord Saga: Book One
Introduction
Hello and welcome to the most embarrassing post I’ve made so far this year. Today, I’m going to be reading some of my old writing. I’ve sampled a few bits from older pieces I was able to gather and will be reading and reacting to these samples throughout this post. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate and recover everything that I’ve written. I did pull up some old Overlord Saga drafts. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find more than the first chapter of Elegance and Slaughter, which I only found because it had been used for querying back in the day. Some of these works are over ten years old, so I suspect they’ll be sufficiently cringe-inducing enough to justify this post.
In this series, I’ll be going through sections from Overlord Saga Books One and Two (I couldn’t find the third book and beyond), the first chapter of Elegance and Slaughter, a bit of How I Ruined My Life, and I’ll even read over an excerpt from Edwin. This isn’t just a showcase of my worst work, however--I want to actually break down why this writing is terrible, suggest how I could improve it, and talk about what I’ve learned since making these mistakes. I aspire to make this post amusing, yes, but also informative!
I’m actually going to be splitting this into three parts. Originally it was going to be one, but there’s so much for me to go over that I just had to expand it. So, in this post, I’m going to talk about the Overlord Saga’s first book, and I’ll cover both the second book and Elegance and Slaughter in the following post, next week. In the last one… I’m going to be cringing at Edwin and How I Ruined My Life. Yeah, you heard me. I’m going to tear apart my first stories that got glowing reviews from people who know how to review stories. They make me cringe. I’m going to talk about why.
If you’d like, you can watch me cringe on camera by checking out the video version of this post:
The Overlord Saga I: Obligation
Last month I released a piece that went through my path as a writer, beginning with the time when I was five years old and working up to the present day. Well, if you’ve already looked at that post, you may remember that I mentioned something called The Overlord Saga. This story was a series of several books about an evil, Illuminati-esque organization. It was a hidden world fantasy for horrible people. The Overlord Saga was pretty much the beginning of the end for my aimless scribing because it paved the way for Edwin, which is another story we’ll look at later in this post.
I wrote several books in this series. I think at least six or seven, probably more. I believe I had planned nine in total, with them being three separate trilogies that tied together. I was only able to find the first two books by digging through some old emails on a very old email account (which was a lot of work to get access to). I’m not sure where the others are… they’re probably in some long-forgotten Dropbox account that’s tied to a long-deleted Yahoo! email address. That’s my best guess, anyway.
Enough delaying, though… it’s time to get to the cringe. The following are excerpts I’ve hunted down and taken from the first book.
Opening Page
When most stories begin, the atmosphere tends to be dark and gloomy. The weather is generally dreadful, and it's almost always night. Well, this time, our story begins before the sun has departed to bring day to the other side of the world. There is no rain to speak of – in fact, there isn't a single cloud in the sky. As the massive ball of fire that delicately hovers above our planet (and which children affectionately depict as a cheerful thing) begins to work its way behind distant trees, two young students whose future rests in the fragile dusk sit upon a curb in front of their small-town high school.
For the opening, I actually want to praise what I was trying to do here. The story of The Overlord Saga is incredibly dark. There are grisly murders, lots of crime, tons of innocent people die… it’s quite grim. So when I set out to write this first book, I wanted to contrast all of that by setting up the story with a setting that appeared cheerful. It isn’t a dark and gloomy night, it’s actually a bright, sunny day.
However, I then go on to paint a scene of existential dread as I talk about just how terrifying the sun actually is. I’m not sure how I feel about this contrast taking place in the same paragraph that my description of a perfectly calm, cheery afternoon appears. I probably should have split these up to keep that contrast going. Overall, though, this isn’t that bad of an opening paragraph, considering that it was written ten years ago.
Don’t worry, though. It’s about to get a lot worse.
Opening Page (Continued)
As always, this is a story about a boy and a girl. A boy, who against all odds, is his own hero. His long, unkempt black hair had a tendency to fall into his eyes. Full of quirks and recognized as a strange character by those who know him, the young man, Alec Marshall, counted himself lucky to be in the lovely company of Lynda Farrell.
Lynda Farrell – beautiful, graceful, and mysterious. Her long, brunette hair was presently held back with a headband as she sat on a small curb with the boy that loved her. Her eyes – by far her most distinguished feature – were shining hazel lights. She sighed as Alec stared into them.
My first critique here is just that my tenses are all over the place, but that’s honestly just a problem I have always had. I tend to write in first person present now because I’ve found it feels most natural, but I was definitely still finding my voice when I wrote this, so everything was a jumbled mess of tenses. Any editor could fix this pretty easily. The real cringe is in the content, not the delivery.
The first thing that I do is paint Lynda as an absolute goddess in Alec’s eyes. It’s just dreadful. I would never do this in any writing today. The romances I write now are grounded and rational, this is pure infatuation. There’s nothing wrong with writing infatuation if you know you’re writing it, but I absolutely didn’t know that. I thought I was writing Alec as being someone who was in love with this girl.
Not only do I paint her as a goddess, but I then use the word mysterious. I have read through the next several pages. There is nothing at all mysterious about her. What in the world was supposed to be mysterious about Lynda besides the fact that she’s a woman and Alec clearly doesn’t know anything about women?
Actually, you know what, that’s probably what’s mysterious. Never mind. I figured it out.
Lynda and Alec’s Dialogue
“What's on your mind, Lynda?” Alec asked. “You said you needed to talk?”
“Yes, I did.” Lynda replied hesitantly, rubbing her hands along her thighs. She was clearly nervous.
“Well, we've been sitting out here for ten minutes and you have yet to say anything. Not that I mind spending quiet time with you.” The dark-haired boy smiled at her.
“Alec,” She sighed. “I lied to you.”
One of Alec's eyebrows raised. “About what?”
“Having feelings for you. I thought I did, but I don't.”
Alec winced. “What do you mean you thought that you did?”
“I just thought I did, okay? I'm sorry.”
“Lynda, I've cared for you for three years, now, yet when you finally say that the feelings are mutual, you up and leave three weeks later?”
“I'm sorry, Alec.” Lynda said.
“You're sorry.” Alec repeated. He stood up. “Alec…”
“No. If you don't have anything else to say, we're done here. This isn't fair, all right?” He began to walk away, ignoring the girl when she called after him.
I cannot express to you how much this dialogue pains me to read. Not only is it just clunky, but there is so much disgusting entitlement that bleeds through it. I’m not even sure where to begin. This is just bad. But, I’m going to try to break down exactly what’s wrong with it.
First of all, just from a purely technical perspective, this dialogue is entirely unnatural and extremely thick on the exposition. I’ve also just been overbearing with how obsessed Alec is with Lynda. I gave the reader more than enough information from the beginning to ensure the reader knows that he likes her and she’s apprehensive. I should have stopped with that, but I just had to keep pushing it. It’s a lot.
However, I also want to point out just how creepy and entitled this makes Alec seem. It would be one thing if that had been my goal like it was with How I Ruined My Life. However, with The Overlord Saga, I wanted Alec to seem selfish and unkind, yes, but not… you know, an incel. That is absolutely how he comes across here. He is completely obsessed with this woman and then we find out that he’s been after her for three years and they’ve only been together for three weeks. Alec is absolutely the piece of garbage here. This is unbearable to read.
I’m going to skip ahead here, but I could honestly spend hours just ripping apart this first chapter in the book. I can’t do that, though, because we have a lot more content to get to. I’m jumping ahead to about the midway point of the book.
Romance
So, I actually don’t hate the plot of this book, if I’m perfectly honest. Alec is recruited by this organization of overlords because they believe he can be of use to them. Specifically, one mentor in the organization sees him as someone who could potentially be good at social manipulation. That’s what he brings him onto his team for. The mentor’s name is Sake and, in truth, he’s actually on the verge of being executed by the organization because the last several apprentices he’s had have turned out to be failures. Alec is his last hope at saving his own skin, but Alec doesn’t know that. There’s a good potential story here, but I totally missed the mark.
Anyway, Alec and Sake go to Los Angeles--a city that I had never visited at this point, mind you--and are holed up in a hotel from which they’re plotting to steal… a special mineral from a museum in LA. The mineral has some sort of property that makes it capable of being used as a battery for a powerful weapon being developed by the Overlords.
Okay, so the plot isn’t that great, in the end.
Anyway, part of Alec’s job is to get someone from the museum to fall for him so that he can use her to get access to the museum’s more secure areas, as well as learn things like security routines, passcodes, that sort of thing. Again, the plot does fall apart when you look at it for any length of time, but I was learning! Cut me some slack. One of us has to.
So, here’s a scene with Alec and the woman that he’s trying to… eh, seduce. Oh! And this woman is also an old friend of Alec’s. Another reason why he was handpicked for this specific job. See? I thought of some things. Not everything, but some things. Anyway, here’s a scene that’s supposed to be romantic.
They'd stayed at the restaurant for over an hour, talking about nearly anything that there was to talk about before Savannah said that she needed to get home to rest before she went back to the museum the next morning. Alec gazed at her more extensively than he stared at the water or the bridge, her soft skin illuminated by blue and red lights mixed with the paleness cast from the moon. Alec began to find himself lost, and his captivation was only broken when Savannah spoke again. “I'm glad I met you, again. This was a wonderful date.”
Alec smiled. “It was. You're just as much fun as I remember.”
Savannah didn't say anything in response, she simply smiled softly back at him as cars whizzed by, blowing her hair away from her face. When she reached forward and took his hand in hers, Alec felt a sudden rush and smiled at her, taking her other hand. The two simply stood there, silent.
“I didn't realize how much I've missed you,” Alec commented. “Nor did I realize the impact your absence had.”
“What do you mean?” Savannah asked him.
“After you left, a lot of things changed. That was the same year my mother took my siblings away, my dad went crazy, I lost my friends, just --” Alec looked away. “A lot of things changed that year.”
Savannah frowned. “I'm sorry.”
“It's all right, Savannah. It isn't your fault. You're here now, anyway. I have my best friend back. How much luckier can I get?”
Okay. Okay, there’s so much wrong here. That was extremely hard to read. Maybe this post was a bad idea. There’s part of me that wants to just stop and not share this, but I’ve already put several hours of work into it, so I’m going to power through. Let’s break down why this is so terrible.
First of all, I keep writing the names of the characters when it’s completely unnecessary. This is something I outgrew about a year or two later. My dialogue and dialogue tagging in How I Ruined My Life isn’t perfect, but it is absolutely a step up from this travesty. Additionally, I have once again included dialogue that feels completely unnatural and just weird.
What makes me cringe the most is him saying that he has his best friend back. At this point in the story, they’ve seen each other maybe three times in the past week. They were best friends when they were about ten or eleven years old. They’re eighteen now and they know very little about one another. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if Savannah didn’t reciprocate, but she does. She says she feels the same way. It makes no sense. They’ve also done terribly little bonding!
Also, I love how I specify that they stand there in silence and then immediately follow it with Alec breaking the silence to unveil some obnoxious exposition about how terrible his life became when Savannah left--something that we, the reader, didn’t know and probably would have been fine not knowing at this point. There was no reason whatsoever for him to unveil this right now. If he’s trying to seduce her, this would have been the time to kiss her, not turn her into a therapist (which he absolutely does as the book continues).
Infiltration
I’m going to do one last excerpt from the first Overlord Saga book, in this post. This last excerpt takes place closer to the end of the book when Alec and Sake are getting that mineral from the museum that they want oh-so-badly.
“And what does all of this have to do with me?” Alec asked. “Why was I dragged into this?”
Florence laughed. “That's just it. This has nothing to do with you. You were just unlucky. Sake was a complete moron, and took a mission that should have been a simple extraction mission and turned it into a massive ordeal! He's been on this assignment for several weeks now, and has almost gotten caught so many times.”
She shook her head, smiling at Alec in a seemingly mad way. “Sake had no clue what he was doing. I'm surprised that he even managed to extract the benitoite at all, to be honest. The dread council knew what they were doing, though.”
“So there was no reason for my involvement?” Alec asked, looking down at his hands and remembering everything that had happened to him over the last two weeks.
“No reason at all. Eric Holden was only interested in you because Sake was. Eric is basically a lost puppy – he and the rest of the Dark Company just do as the Shadow Alliance does, but with the twinge of insanity that makes them, shall we say, unique.”
So, this is actually something that I’m somewhat proud of in this story. The execution of the idea was all wrong, but the idea itself wasn’t so bad. This takes place in the museum. Members of the Shadow Alliance--which is the organization of Overlords I’ve been talking about, which Sake works for--come in and basically blow the museum apart, making a big show. They explain that Sake way overcomplicated the mission and that there was no reason at all for Alec to be involved at all. Sake just liked to be dramatic and flourishing, which is one of the many reasons he’s being killed. However, now that Alec has been roped into everything and has even committed murder, he’s sort of in over his head and joining the alliance in his best course of action.
This problem with all of this is that I only decided on it when I was halfway through the book. As I wrote, I realized that my entire book was unraveling. Everything was unnecessarily complicated and made no sense. I was becoming a better storyteller while I wrote and yet… I didn’t want to start over. So instead of starting over, I changed the narrative. I made Sake--the main character’s mentor--a complete moron. I made it clear that he was always going to be removed from the alliance and that everything that’s happened to Alec has been the result of Sake’s self-indulgence and melodrama (which was, truthfully, my own self-indulgence and melodrama, as I originally concocted this whole plan for the book thinking it was brilliant.
Again, the idea was perfectly fine, but my execution was simply dreadful. If I had gone back and reviewed, replanned, and rewritten this book, it probably wouldn’t have been so bad! Yet, here we are, reading through my cringe-inducing, poorly thought-out book together.
Conclusion
Wow, okay. I need to reflect after reading through all of that. This was rough on me. I knew that there would be cringe in this book, but I didn’t realize just how terrible it was going to be. I hesitate to read what awaits me in the second book, but we’re going to tackle that monster next Friday. In the meantime, I think I need a hot shower and probably an hour or two with my therapist. I hope that you got a good laugh from this post! Next Friday, we’re going through the sequel to this first book in the saga and I’ll be reading from the first chapter of the standalone novel I wrote as a prequel to this series, called Of Elegance and Slaughter. I actually got a few query responses when I sent out the first chapter of that novel to a few agents, so… the cringe can’t be all that terrible… can it?
In the meantime, your support would mean the world to me! The best way to show support right now would be subscribing to my YouTube channel and checking out the videos over there, but you can also show your love to me on other forms of social media. I’m on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as @TLBainter, with Instagram being my most active. Those links will all be down below.
Stay tuned for the upcoming posts I’ve got! Between now and my next old writing reaction, I’m going to be releasing another story review and another part of my homebrew campaign tutorial series, so please check those out if they interest you. Until then, bye!