Things You Find in Your House While Cleaning–Part II

So I found this old notebook that I used from around my junior year of high school through first year of college. It's full of crappy poetry and drafts of things never completed, along with fragments of early published stories like "Mahout" (Asimov's) and "So The Dead Walk Slowly" (Fear Magazine).But if I'd lost it and someone had found it, they'd have found little evidence this person was ever gonna publish a book or two...Like, a poem entitled "Pity Me Monster Math Unkind," modeled after cummings. Or "A Flash of Blue," a retelling of the wooden boy story that starts off "The sea was his womb and his creator a pair of wrinkled hands that lifted him, senseless, from the churning surf."A discarded beginning from a tale meant for The Book of Frog: "When there were no kings and the moors were silent with the sound of their own silent breathing, there was only toad. Toad, sitting high upon a half-submerged hillock, surveying his broken kingdom."Something about a storm, no idea what it was from: "The rain came twisting and pelting down harder and harder, blasting in from the sea, the sound accelerating, moving into higher and higher gear."The thing is, I was writing this stuff at the same time as the story that got into Asimov's. You hit on something that works, that has structural integrity, but you don't know how you did it. So even after you get published in places you consider an indication that you might have what it takes to make it, you spend a lot of years figuring out how to consciously replicate the things you did without thinking, so you can do them consistently.