Cringing at the blatant self-insert story I wrote when I was eleven

Picture this: you’re eleven years old. Your favourite book series is CHERUB by Robert Muchamore. You are obsessed with magic. You’re a budding author. What do you do? Obviously, you write your own story, combining your two favourite things and starring yourself.

Flash forward to three days ago: you’re now 24. You find the first three chapters of this story. You begin to cry at how beautiful of a story you wrote. You send it to your best friend. Your best friend proceeds to make an excerpt of it her phone background and insists you write a blog post about it. This is that blog post. Please enjoy.

Chapter one: the exposition

Chapter one is titled “me” so you know it’s all going to be about our main character. We have a couple really strong first paragraphs that really set the tone of the story.

The subversion of expectations. The budding “feminism”. The Shrek-like introduction. The impeccable writing. This really indicates right off the bat that we are in for a good story.

The next paragraph sets up the main character’s trauma: her father died we she was an infant, and the rest of her family died in a car crash.

Please note the single pink period at the end of this paragraph.

Not to fear, though, she was recruited to a secret organization called ANGELS. Which is definitely not a blatant rip-off of CHERUB and is totally a 100% distinct thing.

I mean, sure, CHERUB and ANGELS are practically the same name, and no one knows what either of them stand for, and you have to take tests to get in to both, and both recruit you by putting agents in orphanages. BUT! At ANGELS you get magic powers! That is very different from CHERUB!

I really enjoyed the narrators subtle bragging here. Obviously she passed all the tests easily.

The next paragraph is really the best. The pièce de résistance, one might say. We finally get a picture of our main character, Amelia. This is the paragraph my best friend made her phone background.

There is so much going on in this paragraph that I really cannot. Some highlights:

• “I hated it!”
• “(bonus!)”
• “I’m thin and pretty.”
• “never having to eat!!!”
• Glowing eyes??? GLOWING. EYES???
• Giving myself the power to have any power in the world. Like, I really did that. With my whole chest, I thought “yeah, that’s a normal magical ability to get”.
• The outfit! THE OUTFIT!!!!!!!
  • 3 inches above my knees
  • one strap
  • flip flops
  • a fashion icon
  • Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way could never
  • I used used to draw myself in this outfit all the time
• I want to point out that at 11, I also had a single purple braid in my hair for about five months and thought it was the shit.
• Amelia is a Mary Sue if I ever saw one.

The next paragraph describes ANGELS, in case anyone was still confused about it, and tells us about Amelia’s friends.

Some favourites from this paragraph:

• “but we don’t like her.”
• the cold way I describe my “boy       friend”
  • “I do have a boy friend. He is named Jess.”
  • You can really feel the love and passion here
  • The defensiveness of the word “do”

I then continued with the exposition by describing our day-to-day life.

This paragraph also has a lot of gems:

• “self-defense – verbal and physical”: WHAT is verbal self-defense? Is it yelling at people? Is it being a smart-ass? Is it taught by Ben Shapiro?
• You have to learn FIVE languages? FIVE!!!!
• “African”: AFRICAN?????? AFRICAN?????

We end the chapter with a similarly strong ending:

Chapter two: homework

We’ve made it to chapter two, which details a day in Amelia’s life. We start strong with this very normal dialogue and a lot of running:

Why is Jess running frantically? Why does he call her Madam? Is that what 11-year-old me thought was flirting?

Amelia recruits the rest of her friends to join in the homework, including that bitch Nancy. They go to Katrina’s room, get sprayed with popcorn (obviously, the pranksters), and get to work. Nancy, the bitch, takes this opportunity to flirt with Jess, who she obviously likes and he obviously hates.

The homework session is interrupted by Amelia’s cellphone ringing, and we get a description of her ring tone.

My best friend Charlotte tried to make her dad’s ring tone be her saying “ring ring” when we were 11. Life imitates art, art imitates life.

Amelia then has a very normal phone conversation:

This is very exciting because Sara West is a mission controller (another term I blatantly stole from CHERUB)!!!!! This means Amelia and Simi are going on a mission. Together. Duh.

That bitch Nancy is also going on the mission with them! Very exciting. So the three of them pack up and head to the mission control building to learn about their mission. This is where they meet Sara, who describes the mission to them. It is a very totally normal mission.

That’s right. Amelia is going under cover as a rich bitch and Nancy and Simi are her maids! But, you might be wondering, won’t the family notice another child randomly showing up? Amelia had the exact same thought. Luckily, Sara has an explanation.

“I was speechless” is perhaps the best response to learning that your entire family is still alive. Can we also respect the dramatic queen, Sara, pausing for effect? Iconic.

The mission is fairly simple: someone is trying to kill Amelia’s family. Because Amelia has the power to have any power and is a secret agent, her, Simi and Nancy are going to infiltrate her family to track down the person trying to kill them. Understandably, they don’t want to get killed. Nancy has more important concerns.

This next paragraph I’m including solely for the incredible amount of detail I included:

“Normal stuff”. Such detail. Wow.

The next paragraph describes Amelia’s mom, Mrs. Rivierra. She sounds lovely.

MONTHS???? Did I not understand bruising?

That was the end of Chapter two, a very strong ending, if I do say so myself.

Chapter three: the mission

This chapter has another strong start:

“Did I mention I was rich? Sorry!”

You just know this bitch used the exact same line at some point in undergrad.

We then get some casual incest and mind reading, just for fun:

It’s not really incest because Will doesn’t know the “hot chick” is his sister. But Amelia needed everyone to know that EVERYONE thought she was thin and pretty.

Amelia mind-tells Will to let her in and then drops the bomb that it is her, his long-lost sister. But Will has his own bomb to drop.

Her dad is still alive??? The plot twist of the century!! You’ll never guess what his explanation is, which we get in this paragraph with some more very natural dialogue. No really, you’ll never guess:

“in case you were wondering”

Will and Amelia/Simony go to her room so Nancy and Simi and unpack her things and Will can explain everything.

Okay what. So this family’s thought process was: dad travels a lot for business. This will obviously be hard for our young daughter. Instead of explaining to her that he has to travel a lot for work, we will tell her that he is dead. That will be much less traumatic and will definitely not fuck her up when he returns.

WHAT??? What is that logic?? I mean, I know 11-year-old me wrote this, but what was my thought process??

So that is unfortunately the end of what I found. I don’t think I ever finished my masterpiece, but I do know 11-year-old me fairly well, so here is how I think it would have ended and what would have 100% been included:

• One of them will have to hack a computer, probably Amelia because she’s the best at it (presumably).
• One of them will be whipped by Clara/Mrs. Rivierra and the red mark will last for months OR Amelia will heal the red mark.
• Amelia uses her powers and transforms into her ~*~outfit~*~. This is how her family learns she’s part of ANGELS and has magical abilities.
• The fact that Dad works in Russia and Amelia speaks Russian is not a coincidence. Amelia is going to overhear him discussing something with a co-worker and understand it.
• What she hears is that DAD is the one who was trying to kill the family.
• Why is he trying to kill her family? Good question. I have no idea. If I were to guess, I would guess one of two things:
  • (1) Clara (mom) is also in on it. The two of them are in cahoots to kill their children? For some reason? Amelia and her friends kill or arrest both Clara and Dad. All of the siblings join ANGELS except for Violet because she didn’t pass one of the tests because she’s a little bitch.
  • (2) I still don’t know a motive, but probably something to do with Clara’s job. She’s corrupt or doesn’t deal with Russia or something along those lines. Dad succeeds in killing Clara. Amelia and her friends kill or arrest Dad. All of the siblings join ANGELS except for Violet because she didn’t pass one of the tests because she’s a little bitch.
• I can see no ending that does not include all of the siblings except for Violet joining ANGELS.
• There will be some romance between Will and Simi because at the end of Chapter Three, Simi “smiles” at Will, clearly indicating romantic interest. Sparks were flying. It will happen.
• Honestly, Nancy probably does something to get kicked out of ANGELS. She either steals something of Amelia’s or turns against them or tells someone about ANGELS and is kicked out. That is definitely something I would have done.

As we can all tell, I was a literary genius. Robert Muchamore who?

I found these chapters by going through my old sent emails, and finding that I had sent this to one of my friends at the time. I also wanted to include the bits of email that came with this story.

My friend Sama, bless her soul, wrote:

To which I responded:

You mean to tell me that Amelia, who looks exactly like me, is based on me??? What?? Yeah, no shit, binch. We been knew.

But anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post and my terrible writing and that this was entertaining. Please let me know below your favourite part or what you thought!

Did you write stories when you were younger? Have you ever gone back and reread them? Let me know, I’d love to hear about them!

Thanks for reading! xx