I've begun an embarkment (is that even a word?) on a worrisome and difficult mission- I've recovered my old story Seraphim (started about 2 and half years ago) from where it was floating around in cyber space and begun to read through it, comparing it to my current book to see how I've (hopefully) improved.
To give a little info on this story, it is a tale of a young boy who is the son of the leader of one of the most powerful organizations on the planet, an international quasi-military organization charged with defending humanity from a group of mysterious beings of great power. He is brought to the organization without explanation and ends up piloting a massive machine in order too- OK, let me stop there.

Yeah, it is an Evangelion clone. Oh, there are differences, of course, and plenty of other influences other than Eva, particularly since I didn't really understand Eva back then. But still, all in all, you can pretty much graph the character development from Eva characters to their rough equivalent in my own story. After I got over my anger at having lost some fifty-odd pages of writing from Seraphim, I eventually began writing my current project, City of Kindling, when my brother repeatedly bugged me that the story I had created for our group's RPG sessions would make a great story. Just to get him to leave me alone, I tried writing it. At first I thought there was no way I could make it work, that anything created in such a genre as an rpg couldn't possibly be turned into a publishable story (tell that to Dragonlance I suppose), but as I continued I began to realize just how much I loved the world I had created and that it did, indeed, make a good story.
More importantly, I came to another realization- City of Kindling, when it comes down to it, was the single first story I'd ever come up with that was truly unique, of my own creation. It had influences of course, but still, you couldn't strip away all of the details added on and spot what lay underneath- because what lay underneath was me.

As I continued to write Kindling, getting more into it as I went, I began to look back at Seraphim with unease, then embarrassment, then disgust. It is a well known fact that you are your own worst critic, and suddenly all I could see were Seraphim's flaws, eighty feet tall in glowing neon letters. Now its been years since I've read it, and I'm going in, seeing just how bad the prognosis really is... considering I used to plan to get this thing published...

Surprisingly, its not really all that bad. Sure the writing is quite amateurish compared to my current standards, the characterization can be inconsistent, and there is a sentence every couple of paragraphs that makes me groan or roll my eyes or sigh, but all in all, it's much better than I thought it would be. Of course, at this point I've only read the first chapter, but I would have that that one would be the worst.

So I think this is actually giving me a boost of confidence. I've always feared that I am much too close to my own writing to judge it objectively, but this is a story I've abandoned years ago and have given up for lost- and I find it actually acceptable. Not great, below average maybe, but here's the thing- I've read worse books. Books written by people who make a living writing them. And that, oddly enough, gives me hope.

I just wish I'd picked a first novel that wasn't so freaking long.