Over at Wyrdsmiths, my alter ego posted her usual Saturday Mornings Funnies. This time I've chosen to embarass myself with something more recent -- from my college years. As I explain in my post, like most writers, I have a collection of these sorts of short beginnings that fizzle out and don't go anywhere. I've never "thrown them away" (read: deleted, as most of them are Word files of one sort or another), because I always secretly hope that inspiration will hit and I will find the perfect ending for them some day.
How about you? Do keep your scraps? Have you ever finished one of them?
4 comments:
Yeah, my hard drive is littered with them. I don't really consciously throw them out, but if I rebuild my machine I only restore them from backup if I think they're going to go somewhere. Eventually, I overwrite that backup.
Anything I like enough to put in version control is spared this shameful fate.
I need to discipline myself, though, because given half a chance I'd rewrite all my old stuff to make it better.
--Katherine
I have a filing cabinet with two drawers in the attic of my grandparents' old house that my cousin now occupies. The top drawer contains hanging files of projects that are between one and five pages that I never anticipate working on again. But, before the Y2K scare, I printed them all off the old dinosaur Epson 2000 we had, so there it is, in dot matrix with perforated edges, hanging file by file.
We do not mention the grave misfortune of the Gateway laptop or the start-stops that went with it.
Most of my other start-stops are contained in notebooks that have been haphazardly thrown into big purple tubs along with stuffed animals, knick-knacks, and ancient birthday cards. One of these days, when I rescue my file cabinet, I'll rip out those notebook pages and file them away under subject, too. You just never know what you might want later.
-Mel
PS: I've started editing Thieves. I'm going to try to work on a chapter a day, and see how that goes.
Off topic, but I've got your flying car here . . . it's successfully test flighted.
Hover Car
I've got a great couple of stories that I would love to finish. ...Unfortunately, the one story I would love to get published revolves around several real-life occurrences that I am sure would result in a lawsuit if the people found out it was them I was writing about--even after assuming a pen-name & changing the names in the manuscript. Simply because they're the kind of people who would go and do that. So I guess I'll never be finishing it. (sigh)
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