Last week, I was straightening up some things in the writing corner of my room, and I came across an old-fashioned cardstock folder, the kind of 20th-Century tech where people kept paper files. Held inside the folder was a hard copy version of “Nights of Sorrow,” one of my first ever finished short stories. My heart sang with joy every time I winced at how utterly amateurish the writing is. Amateurish is me being extremely kind to 18-year-old me who wrote it. The grammar and punctuation are horrendous. It’s trite, cliche, and cringe. BUT! It's also beautiful in the context of my writer's journey. I'm so glad I found it. What a delight.

So... naturally, I dictated it into my computer and posted it to my Patreon page. Yes, I put it behind a paywall. I figure if people want to see this time capsule of my writing, I might as well hold it for ransom. Bwahahahahahaha!

Let me tell you, reading it to the computer was another experience that warmed my heart. I’m smiling like an idiot thinking about both the story and my reading it. I had to break from it a couple of times and grow, “This is really bad.” The story is only 4300 words, but it took several sessions across two days to get it all out and then another two days to edit the dictation errors so that it’s almost word-for-word, punctuation-for-punctuation of the original rough draft of the story. I’m still smiling thinking about the process.

Doing all that work allowed me to feel so much gratitude for how far I've come in my understanding of writing as a craft, skill, and art form.

The other night, I was straightening up again, and I thought to myself, what other treasures do I have buried in my files? So, out the files came. For over an hour, I flipped through file after file, rediscovering old friends. Some of those stories I don’t even remember writing. Well, that is, I hadn’t remembered writing them. No, that’s wrong too. It’s that they weren't in easily accessible parts of my brain. Once I saw those files and read through the stories (cringing quite a bit), memories flooded into me. I didn’t just remember writing the stories; I recalled writing groups and friends I'd shared them with, some of those friends had also faded from immediate memory, just like the stories. So many nostalgic smiles.

So... naturally, I’m going to start holding more of those stories for ransom on my Patreon. Bwahahahahahaha!

However, this post is about more than those stories. It’s also about the melancholy I feel at stories I’ve written that I’ll never read or see again. You see, the act of discovering these stories has reminded me of other stories I destroyed or lost over the years, either due to changes in technology, crashed hard drives and web servers, or in several instances when I destroyed drafts. I can vividly recall the heat on my face and hands when I fed page after page of the original draft of Spellpunk to the flames into a BBQ grill. My heart is heavy with regret that I won’t be able to flip through those pages and marvel at the audacity of younger me—the me that dared to dream that I could make a serious go of this writing game. Ohh the optimism! Ohh the hubris!

Nowadays, I keep everything because I write everything longhand in notebooks and journals. I choose good quality journals. Partly because I like good quality journals. Partly because my next level of hubris is that someone will find some nostalgic value in them after I'm gone. Maybe my kids. Maybe some soup Uber fan. Maybe some academic institution will put them on display to celebrate my literary genius. (I did mention something about hubris.) Then again, maybe nobody, but I hope and dream. After all, what is Man without hopes and dreams?

For all my fellow creatives, especially those creatives at the beginning of your journeys, hold onto your early work. Make a place for all those glorious failures and every magnificent misstep when you're on when you're first figuring things out and whatever art you've given yourself to. Record it. Print it. Cloud storage it.

God, I wish I had videos of me floundering my way through my first storytelling gigs and that old one-man version of Romeo and Juliet. Sigh…

Still, I  have the treasures that I discovered this last weekend. It’s going to be fun getting reacquainted with those old friends—coming soon to my Patreon and A Warts and All Collection near you.