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Scratches 9

usedbooks

on May 4, 2019

I had a bit of a surprise today. My parents came to visit and they brought two boxes of my childhood writing, sketches, and other abandoned projects with them. I sent almost all of it to recycling. Pretty sure my MacGyver fanfiction would be better served as a hipster greeting card or whatever happens to recycled paper.

Anyway, I found a few interesting little snippets including a first-person story called "Man-made." It's in the rounded print writing I used in middle school, so it predates Strange Creatures. (I was prone to writing in first person in those days.) It's about a creature that was created in a laboratory through DNA manipulation and had killed its creator. The animal is apparently "some kind of cat" "the size of a sheltie." The main characters are a wildlife rehabilitator named Dianne and her friend, the zoo vet, Conrad. It's a very different story but similar in setting (and themes, to some degree), and I cannot, for the life of me, remember writing it.