ARK (2009)

Original Completion Date: June 28, 2009

Well, I've finally posted it...one of my very, very old stories I made back when I was just a kid!

At one point last year, I was digging through the attic at my parents' house and found a bunch of blank books that have my very own words and illustrations on them. These handwritten books are one-of-a-kind and brought back so many memories for me! When I was a kid, I used to love getting blank books from the store, writing my very own stories in them, and then sharing my stories with my family and friends. I have not done this in almost seventeen years!

While I was looking through these old books and seeing just how cheesy and ridiculous they all were, I've also noticed that they have such a fun, creative side to them. Chester and the Canines (May 2006) is about a stray kitten who travels from San Fransisco all the way to the California countryside to find a new home, and he makes friends with a bunch of dogs along the way. Dandog the Doberman (October 2006) is about a Doberman with amnesia who is trying to get his memory back and solve the mystery of his past, and for some reason...there is a scene where he sneaks on board an airplane and fights a bunch of evil soldiers on it, even flushing one of them down the toilet on the plane! There is even a sequel called Dandog the Doberman and the Wrath of the Land Sharks (January 2007), and the bad guys are...you guessed it--alien sharks from outer space who can talk and somehow breathe outside of water! I cringe reading this stuff now, because we all know all that never happens in real life, nor can it ever happen (and there's no such name as Dandog, either)! But hey, I was twelve years old and I was a very weird kid back then!

But...as I am cringing, I am also thinking, "man, this was such a simpler time, and I had a crazy active imagination back then!". I was born on September 21, 1994, so I grew up in a time when tablets were not a thing yet, not as many kids were on the Internet, and none of those kids had smartphones just yet. My family has had Internet at home since the 90s, but I didn't really know how to use the Internet fully until sometime in 2008 when I was in my early teens. Even then, the Internet was so much different back then, and it was back when the primary way to get onto it was on a desktop computer instead of on your phone (I got my first iPhone on Christmas 2011 when I was seventeen--the year smartphones first became mainstream!).

Even without any knowledge on the Internet or having such instant access to the Internet from almost anywhere like we do now, I had come up with a bunch of creative ideas and have let my imagination just run wild. As a kid, I played with toys, watched a lot of movies and cartoons, played video games (starting with the good old N64), played outside, and even messed around with a miniature tape recorder (that was one of my favorite toys). A lot of my ideas for my stories back then came from video games and movies. I really started to see movies as a form of art around early 2005, when I watched the movie Bambi (1942) for the very first time at the age of ten. I soon wrote my very own animals-in-nature story after that, one that was called Prince the Duckling (July or August 2005). I hope I can find that one again someday, even though I remember it being very short and unrealistic (I was only ten, what did you expect?).

Out of all of these old stories I found in the attic, ARK (June 2009) caught my attention. It was the very last book I wrote by hand before I switched over to typing all of my stories on a computer. It was also the very last of my books to have my very own illustrations. I loved drawing as a kid, but I was not very good at it. In ARK 09, I can see that my drawings here look so much better than a lot of other drawings I have made in the past. I kind of like the anime-style eyes that I have used for the characters in this one. Actually, I think most of my illustrations were pretty cute since they all came from a kid/early teenager. But after writing ARK, I stopped drawing pictures for my stories because I didn't think I was very good at drawing and I wanted to focus more on improving my words (that does take a lot of time and effort to do).

I also remember what inspired me to write ARK 09 in the first place. I had just gotten into Nintendo's Star Fox franchise at the time and had finally played Star Fox 64 for the very first time on the Wii Virtual Console (it was originally a Nintendo 64 game...one of the very few mainstream ones I did not play back when it was new). I've known what Star Fox was ever since I first played the original Smash Bros. on N64 back when it was new, but the late 2000s was when I finally played an actual Star Fox game. Even though I sucked at Star Fox back then and still do now, I absolutely enjoyed it and wanted to come up with my own "space team origin story" sort of thing. The new 2027 version of this story will be inspired by both the Star Fox video games and the Top Gun movies, but keep in mind that I did not see the first Top Gun just yet while I was writing the 2009 version of ARK. My first time watching Top Gun (1986) happened in late 2011 while I was staying at my parents' cabin in Truckee, California (and while I was in the middle of writing True Friends).

I wrote ARK 09 during the 2008-2009 school year when I was in eighth grade, one of my worst years in school. It was a stressful time filled with a lot of anxiety and drama, and I was also in the middle of trying to get myself accepted into a private high school in Moraga, California at the time. Still, I absolutely enjoyed writing ARK 09 back then and was almost obsessed with it. My mom even made me wait until I graduated eighth grade before she let me finish writing it so that I could focus on my schoolwork. After all, I was about to leave my small rural K-8 public school in Sunol, California pretty soon, and I needed to go out with good grades and great achievements! Summer came pretty quickly, and I remember the summer of 2009 being one of the best summers I've ever had. I got to go to Disneyland with my big sister and her husband, I got over my fear of going on roller coasters that go upside down (and now I love them!), I ditched the stress and all the mean, loud kids at middle school and was moving on to a brand new high school--and it was the private school I mentioned earlier...I got in!

As I read ARK 09 now, I can see just how cheesy and melodramatic it really is. I've also noticed so many moments where I am literal about everything and spell everything out instead of allowing the audience to figure things out for themselves. I also "told" the scenes and the emotions of the characters, instead of "showing" them. Nowadays, I would never dream of writing a sentence that goes, "[Character] was [insert one-word emotion here]." Emotions require a much more vivid description than this! I've also totally ripped off a lot of stuff, as this was back before I knew the difference between an inspiration and a rip-off.

Tonight, I am facing my fears by sharing the original ARK over the Internet in a digital format. To create this document, I typed out every line of handwritten dialogue without making any alterations to it, aside from fixing a few spelling and punctuation errors. I also took pictures of the illustrations with my iPhone 12 Pro Max camera, sent the pictures to my 2021 MacBook Pro, cropped them, and attached them to the pages of this document. I've also provided my own modern-day commentary on the story in the form of footnotes, just to provide some humor and demonstrate just how much I have grown and changed as a writer over the years (and to also make this train-wreck of a story much easier to sit through). I did as many footnotes as I could, but if I pointed out every little flaw, you'd probably be reading this forever.

So, everyone, I'm now about to take you all back to a simpler time, a time that may also remind you of your own childhood. This is taking me back, too, because this is exactly what I used to do back in the day...write crazy, ridiculous stories and then share them with the people I know. I am also doing this so that I can get some ideas on how you guys would like the new 2027 reboot to go! I'm definitely changing the story a lot and adding adult content (drinking, drugs, swearing, blood, extremely unsettling subjects, some sexual references) since the new version is going to be for a more mature audience, but I'm still going to have the talking animals flying fighter jets in space concept. I just need to figure out how the story is going to go, because to be honest, the whole "go on a journey to stop the bad guys from taking over the universe and avenge your father's death" plot has been done to death everywhere, and I would like to do something completely original if that's what everyone wants.

If you want to write a comment, please answer these questions:

1. What changes would you like to see in the new 2027 version of this book?

2. What would you like to see in general?

3. What would you like to stay the same?

P.S. A lot of the characters are either going to be changed or completely scrapped in the new version, but I am planning on keeping Jackson, Howard, and Phoebe around (although Phoebe will now be a rattlesnake instead of a frog).

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