I have been cleaning house, online. Too many stupid files cluttering up unused folders. I like getting rid of stuff that doesn’t make sense to hold on to. In the process, I found several articles that I wrote some time ago that I posted to Faith Writers. I also found starts to several pieces that want to be much longer but somehow fell off the radar and were forgotten. One or two weren’t too bad, others, not so much.

It’s easy to delete an old file if it’s just information about stuff that doesn’t matter anymore. But things that I wrote as fiction, good or bad, I feel obligated to hold on to. I’m not sure why. No one told me I had to hold on to everything. I didn’t sign anything promising to. Something in the back of my head says that it’s archive. “Archive”, now that’s impressive. Much better than “Badly Written and Forgotten”. OK, it’s not all badly written, some of it is quite nice, but there’s some kind of honesty about holding on to the growth path. Not that I everything I write today is fabulous, but it’s interesting to look back at where I’ve been. And I like discovering something very good that I had forgotten completely. It’s like reading it for the first time and finding it pleasing. I want to look around for someone and point my computer, “Can you belive I wrote that!” Anyone? Anyone?

In the end, unless I’m very impressed with an old half-finished story, it probably will remain half-finished. And when I’m dead and gone and historians are excavating my “Archives” and shuttering at what came from my head, I won’t care.