Writing

It has been a while since I have stared at a completed piece of writing (whether it be a poem, a short story, etc.) and felt proud of it.
I think the last time I took pride in my writing was when I was eight.  I had written two stories, both around 60 pages each.  It was about a young girl named Noelle (named after me - my middle name is Noel) and her best friends Chloe and Amanda.  The stories were about her living in the fictitious city of Creepyville, where odd things happen to her and her family and friends.  I had started many different drafts of the third story, but I eventually gave up.  The first story is about how Noelle's friends, while leaving her house after playing in the snow, accidentally step on a crack in the sidewalk and a tornado whisks them away.  They come back later but are sworn to secrecy, so Noelle is left in the dark about where exactly they went and why the tornado took them away.  Noelle also goes through some other things like her mother being remarried, a fight with her friends, her older sister leaving to join the army, and more.
The second story starts when the girls are fourteen and ready to go to high school.  For whatever reason, I decided to leave Amanda out of this story until the very end, when Chloe and Noelle get matching gold charm bracelets and wave them in her face.  Amanda starts whining to her dad.  Apparently, I had her change from a sweet friend to a rich, snobby braggart who always took pleasure in showing off her stuff to Chloe and Noelle.  Anyway, Chloe convinces Noelle to go to Space High, a school in outer space that trains teens to use their superpowers correctly.  (Apparently, Chloe also underwent some changes, because she didn't have any powers in the first story.)  At first, Noelle believes that she doesn't have any powers, but she soon discovers that she has super strength and the ability to fly.  This was inspired by the movie Sky High.  I was obsessed back then.
Anyway.  It's been a while since I've taken pride in my works.  It's been a while since I stared at a completed piece as if it was my own child because in a way, it was.  I knew these characters almost better than I knew myself.  I knew the trials they had gone through because, well, I'm the one who put them through them.  I guess that now that I'm seven years older, I'm a bit less naive and my writing has greatly improved.  I went back through the stories and found some grammatical and spelling mistakes.  More than anything, though, I realized that the story was really lacking.  For example, I noticed that none of the characters changed at all.  They were dull.  The stories were simply about a girl who had adventures.  Like Dora the Explorer.  Which makes me feel sick - I have no desire to have any character of mine be like her.  But the stories were seriously lacking.  They make me laugh now because in my opinion, they were cute.  But it's still kind of hard to see them.
I also have a published book.  No, you wouldn't be able to find it anywhere, because there are only about two or three copies in the world.  It was this special thing that we all did in third grade.  That was about a holographic tortoise and a raven who desperately wants to eat the tortoise but can't.  The raven dispatches a cat to get the tortoise for him.  The tortoise and cat were based off of my own pets, Tortilla Chip (Torty for short) and Heart (who was the daughter of my older cat, Mrs. Sammy).  This book was probably shoved into the corner of my closet or at the bottom of a box because it is like the other two stories.  While I was proud of it then, I came to realize what the story needed.
I feel that it's so hard to write now.  It all starts with an idea.  I usually let the idea just sit for a few days.  I think about what could happen in the story.  I then think about whether it would be a good idea to write about the story or not.  If not, then it gets tossed out and I wait until a new idea comes to me.  Which is rare, considering that I've had writer's block for a while.  But I do have a few ideas that I've been working on.
Then I actually write.  I rarely ever plan because it's so tedious.  It's a bad habit, but that's what I do.  Sometimes I have a few paragraphs written out in my head, and then I put them on paper.  Then I have this other bad habit of reading what I wrote, thinking that it sounds childish, and deciding to not finish it because I have this feeling that it can't get done.  Especially because I have so much else to do, like homework, localization, etc.
But...
I guess it's time to start anew.  I guess it's time that I stopped dilly-dallying by simply writing poems (which are fun, but I seriously need to get back to writing stories) and just wrote.  It's time that I followed the suggestions of my friends and other people (such as authors contacted for advice) and just write.  Because that's what I used to do, and that's how I successfully wrote - and finished - stories.