After my recent forays into story writing (which came after a dry spell that lasted a decade or more) I was lamenting the fact that I'd probably lost most of what I'd written in the 80s and early 90s, for a combination of reasons. For one thing, I would've had the stories on PCs that are long gone or in datasets on the Canada Trust mainframe (also long gone), or possibly even written out on paper (long since thrown out in a cleaning frenzy or filed away in boxes that are God knows where). Another contributor to my fear was that I don't tend to think that I was as organized then as I am now, no matter what timeframes we're talking about. So the chances of my having carefully filed those stories away anywhere I could find them seemed pretty remote.
With that in mind, and having gotten up at 4:30 am because I couldn't sleep, I went to my PC to save off the 5 chapters of Skipped so I wouldn't be thinking the same thing about it years from now. That of course raised the question of where to file the story so that I wouldn't lose track of it. In recent years I've developed a default approach to the recurring question of, "Where should I put this so I can find it later?" that's stood me in good stead whenever I use it. I simply ask myself, with as blank a mind as possible, "Where would I look for it, if I didn't know where it was?" and then the first thing that comes to mind, is where I go and put it. So in this case, I thought, "I'd check to see if I have a Stories mailbox within Eudora on my PC" since that's what I use now for stuff I want to keep that's easily categorizable (New York Rangers e-mails, concert reviews I write, etc). This works well because all of my mailboxes get backed up regularly and moved from PC to PC as I upgrade. So imagine my surprise and delight upon discovering that I already had a mail folder called Stories, and that it contained a dozen or so of my favourite short stories from years past! Clearly I hadn't been as disorganized years ago as I blamed myself for being.
I expect I'll be reading them over in the coming weeks, and posting them here for the enjoyment of whoever stops by. Two in particular were met with great joy when I looked at the contents of Stories: The Dice Men and Rosewood. Two of my all-time favourites of anything I've written (I'd now include Skipped in that group, as well).
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5 comments:
Mark Pilgrim wrote about similar issues from a slightly different perspective... interesting read, and the links are worth following, especially those to other posts on his own site.
Looking forward to them...
Yeah, I've experienced (on a much, much smaller scale) the sorts of format obsolescence issues Pilgrim's complaining about, and to be perfectly honest: my reaction, somewhat subconsciously I suspect, has been to shy away from embracing each new whizbang toy that comes along, because I basically don't trust them not to betray me. I prefer to write in simple (read: ASCII) form because what I care most about is the content of my writing, not the style it's presented in (that's probably, now that I think about it, a good meta statement for me in general: I tend to care about, and be about, the steak, with little or no regard for the sizzle. Anyone who's seen the clothes I wear already knows that, though! :-) So finding my old short stories still around, in a format (essentially .txt) that fortunately hasn't been abandoned in the last ten years, was a double relief!
Happiness is....
...realizing you were as anal and obsessive in your late 20's and early 30's as you are now. ;)
Of course you'd filed your stories in a way you could find them. And no I haven't seen a progression where you are more organized...heavens I'd die if it got any more refined.
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