Lynn Viehl blogged the other day about finding a “lost story” on a floppy disk that she discovered in an old desk drawer.
This happens to me all the time. I have plenty of lost stories buried deep, deep, and deeper on my hard drive—I find them, every now and then, when I’m looking for something else (which is proper, you know, and the way it always goes). Really, though, most of what I’ve forgotten can be found in a mountain of notebooks and journals that I’ve been keeping for…a long time. Way long. You know, the kind of startling length of time you don’t think about, until you’re introduced to someone who’s pretty much an adult, and who was born in the 90’s.
But we’re not going to talk about that.
I probably have more journals in storage somewhere, but I discovered quite a few in a box in the garage about…six months ago? They weren’t exactly lost, I knew where they were…in a roundabout manner. I just didn’t have room for them until then. Many of these notebooks I carried from Seattle to Appleton, Appleton to Madison, then down to Indiana—but I stopped really looking inside them years ago. Maybe even a decade or longer (again, time flies and don’t forget it). As of the time I’m writing this, I still haven’t opened them up. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’ll need to spend a lot of time with them. Maybe because there’s just too much there. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that I have them, and they’re like…time capsules of my imagination.
Here’s a small sampling of them: notebooks and loose sheets of people (people? okay, that’s an honest typo, but I’m keeping it in there because it’s strangely accurate) / paper tucked inside those blazing pink folders.
My earliest writing journal…I started keeping when I was fourteen, or so. I may have lost some, or they’re still scattered in different places—but at least I have that one, and others. I’ve carried them with me all these years like…talismans, maybe. That’s a dramatic word, and I don’t mean for it to sound heavy-handed. But I’ve always taken comfort in having them near, being able to touch them, look at them (even if I don’t look inside). Just knowing that all those dreams and stories and ideas floating around my head since I was a kid are still there, safe.
And that I was able to do something with my other big dreams.
Cool blogs I’ve recently found:
http://elizabethbriel.com/blog/
http://fairytalenewsblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.notebookstories.com/