So, backstory.
The other day I was at the park with my son when I ran into two of my old teachers. They are married and were there taking care of their grandkids. The woman asked me if I was still writing, because she remembered that I used to write funny stories when I was in her class. There’s a slight possibility that I wrote them instead of paying attention to the class.
This woman was my teacher in second grade. She remembers the stories I wrote TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO.
I don’t really remember the stories she talks about, but I remember another one. I was seven years old and I wrote a story about some rabbits who were playing in a forest. A wolf chased them into a tree and trapped them there and after a while they were tired and scared because the wolf was gonna eat them. So they gathered nuts from the tree and they stoned the wolf to death with them
I was seven years old, in case you didn’t notice that the first time.
My teacher loved the story and proposed it for the school magazine. But they made me change the ending because it was too dark. So in the end the rabbits offered to share the nuts with the wolf and they all ate them and became friends. I didn’t like the changes, I thought they were stupid because wolves don’t eat nuts, but it was that or never being published. A harsh lesson for a seven year old.
When I was fifteen years old I wrote a story about a girl who discovered that her world was not real, but a computer simulation. She awoke in the real world and found out she was the test subject for a new «virtual reality» created by a technology corporation. She fell in love with the company director who started to have second thoughts about the morals of the experiment, but his second in comand, an evil (and totally awesome and badass) woman named Xan wanted the company to keep investigating because that technology could change the world and save lives. And make her very, very rich. So she tried to silence the protagonist and locked her again in the virtual world but in the end the «good» guys won and banished Xan to a prison in the virtual world.
Some years later I went to the movies and saw Matrix and, well… you know. I was crushed. But some more years later one of my university teachers told us a story about how he wrote a story similar to Matrix years before the movie was released and I understood that there are no new ideas, not really, only new and interesting ways of putting them into paper.
And some day I am going to put Xan in one of my novels because she was cool.