Stumbling across my first attempt at writing fiction

Flying horses and military science fiction just don't seem to mix.

Back when I was in high school I started mulling over a story idea. I’ve always played with story ideas in my head, but this one was the first one I started writing down. I kept working on it during the first two years of my undergrad.

The story was military science fiction - a genre I’d never read any books in at the time. At that point in my life, I don’t think I’d even read any science fiction then either beyond A Wrinkle in Time. My teenage reading was heavily dominated by Sherlock Holms, James Bond and Ken Follet novels. There just wasn’t the diversity of YA reading choices back then that there are now. Only in my late-teens/early twenties did I start reading science fiction with the Author C. Clarke Rama books.

I don’t remember the full plot of my book, just snippets of a post-apocalyptic planet, that in one iteration was Earth, space ship battles and a futuristic prison. My original idea included Pegasus style horses with wings, but couldn’t come up with any reasonable explanation of how they could possible generate enough lift to get off the ground so I edited them out.

The title was Twilight - chosen over a decade before that title was linked to vampiric romance

Back then, I stored the document on the large floppy disks that were actually floppy, which even if I have the disk stashed somewhere (a distinct possibility), I no longer have a machine that could read it. Rooting through a stack of binders last night, I found a hard copy of the story. The stack of printed pages are thick enough to be roughly 70,000 words, an okay length for a novel.

Since I found it, I’ve been debating if I should read it or not. My expectations are low, I’d expect cringe-worthy cliches and taciturn passages (but, thankfully no flying horses).

I’ve left the binder out while I decide.