For the past few weeks, I've been revisiting the oldest fanfiction of mine still on BZPower. It's something that I always imagined I would do. Maybe it's some kind of compulsion, but I'm kind of obsessed with going back and constantly revising my own work.

I joined this site in 2007 and for me the "Golden Age" was from that time to the Dataclysm. Losing all the fanfictions I had written before that point really felt like the burning of the Library of Alexandria to me. I remember it as having been a vast corpus of work (though, when I look back at the fragments I could find on the Wayback Machine, the chapters are a LOT shorter than I remember, so maybe it's only in my childish memory that I wrote pages of pages of captivating stories).

When BZPower came back online, it felt like something of a resurrection to me. I thought to myself that maybe it was good to purge myself of the old so that I could stretch my wings as an older, wiser author. Looking back at what I wrote as an "older, wiser author," I realize just how cringy and unrefined my style really was.

It makes me stop and wonder, are my current writings that bad? I've spent the past 14 years writing things with the long-term goal of eventually being published professionally, and it scares me to think all of it, no matter how good it feels when I write it, I will look back on as immature juvenalia.

It's also hard to think about how the "Golden Age" of BZPower really only lasted for two or three years for me. The forum came back more than ten years ago, yet it still feels like "new" BZPower for me and my default impulse is that I am still getting used to it.

Anyway, pay no mind to my existential crisis.