Embarassing myself

From matociquala, via papersky and others:
Go ahead and post the awfullest, grottiest, ancientest piece of juvenilia you still have a word processor that will open. I'll wait.

Well, I didn't have a word processor of my own until 1989, by which time I wasn't really a juvenile. The first thing I did with it was to type in the half-finished novel I'd started when I was 19, and then I finished it. It got somewhat polished along the way, but the first chapter didn't change much. So this is something that started as handwriting in erasable ballpen in a notebook, got typed into an Amstrad in Locoscript, then converted (via flat ascii and a disk-transfer service) to Lotus Ami on a PC, and finally to RTF. This is about half of the first chapter. Oddly enough, given that I didn't even have the concept of viewpoint at the time, it's fairly consistently in one POV, which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the thing.

( The Firebird Gate, Chapter 1 )