In response to the Day 17 assignment, “Mine your own material“
Image by Karen Horton (CC BY 2.0)
Remember when I told you about living with the voices in my head and that I’d put my pen aside for far too many years?
Well, you wouldn’t believe what I stumbled across as I was decluttering some files in an old filing cabinet.
To give you a little background, once a year I purge my main filing cabinet to make room for day-to-day documents that I would never keep paperless.
And the other file cabinet has stuff that I need to hang onto for the long-term like tax documents (at least 6 years), warranties for electronics and appliances and receipts for big ticket items (for as long as I have the item).
This cabinet also has projects and stuff from my younger days that I wanted to keep but not necessarily access on the regular.
But I had a few free hours to kill and accompanied by Netflix, I decided to tackle cabinet #2.
And I’m glad that I did because this is what I found:
Now don’t be all impressed or anything. What you see above is more of a mishmash of draft chapters than an entire manuscript. I honestly didn’t even remember that I had these drafts.
This is just proof (to myself) that some of my characters have been aimlessly rambling around lost since circa 1997. And the year is just my guesstimate since within these pages I refer to “pagers” and the old school answering machines we used to have back in the day.
Eventually, I will read through all of it but from the pages I did thumb through, it is quite amusing to see how the draft storyline of “then” is markedly different than the storyline of what I am working on “now”.
Time, maturity, age and experience have definitely changed where I plan on eventually taking this story.
What have you written that you have been hanging onto? And what do you plan on doing it?
Images and content ©2015 Marquessa Matthews. All Rights Reserved.
Marquessa 
I used to have an extensive paper file system before I went electronic, but alas, things get lost or worse, filed in Washington DC and require a Copy Fee to retrieve. I got better with my electronic file copies from 2002 and on. Many have been published on Amazon or featured on my blog. Currently, I save backups of my current writing catalog (and everything else that’s important) at OneDrive and Google Drive should I encounter any computer problems (knock wood).
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🙂
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I left out the weeping and gnashing of teeth part over losing two completed manuscripts…hehe. I’ll rewrite them, but it would be nice to see how two things I wrote over 25 years ago would compare with what I do today. 🙂
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It would be interesting to see the difference!
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Even better when I get the fee together to pay the Library of Congress to send me the first story I wrote that was aimed for publication back in 1990…hehe.
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Finding something, you forgot you ever had, is so pleasing and exciting and a moment of joy! Well, I am not a writer like yourself, but I did use to write a daily journal(about me and my hubby’s relationship) 3 years ago(before I got married) and I know I have it somewhere, I will be thrilled to find it some day and read it together. 🙂
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That would be so sweet to read it with him!
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Yeah, if I ever find it. 😀
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I like this…or maybe I just like thinking about the “good ol’ days” with pagers and real answering machines. Before things got so complicated and I was required to take a laptop to college…this technology thing just blows my mind; I too have that hording habit of just starting a thought or mostly finishing a draft
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Glad to know that I am not alone in those thoughts! 🙂
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