Last night, I pulled out a folder to look at my old school photos—my partner and I were talking memories and there was someone I couldn’t remember the name of but my partner couldn’t remember and so I was 100 per cent sure that they existed—and in that folder are all of my writing assignments from some of the schools I went to. And … they’re not that bad.

I’m going to work on digitising them so I can immortalise them on here and show my development of a writer from back then. I don’t have any of my early fiction writing from when I started fervently writing when I was eleven (nor my early picture books when I was about seven) but that’s probably for the better …

Most of the work is from Years 9-12, with a handful from Year 8, because that was when teachers were starting to encourage my in English. Until Year 10, I had thought my strength was in maths right up until then. And so it was weird to find out that it’s actually English, especially because I disliked English the most. It was always so confusing and I could never understand what I was doing wrong. Which is something that continued with me into university, but it became less about “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong” and more about “I don’t know what I’m doing right”. The less I thought about it, the easier it was. Which is a pain in the as—

And so, I will be going through my old writing, and maybe even fixing them up and seeing if there’s any potential in them to improve on and use.