NEW STORIES FROM AN OLD SOURCE

I’ve been clearing out my files lately, going through and tossing things that are no longer relevant to me and my life. I have a tendency to keep everything—every scrap of paper, every event program or ticket stub; every submission entry that got rebuffed. In my look down file cabinet memory lane, I found newspaper clippings from when there were newspapers. I found printouts from internet searches because loading used to be so slow I printed anything I thought I might want to read again. I also turned up a whole drawer full of rejection slips from manuscript queries to publishers and agents. At one point they were relevant but not any more, so I tossed them.

Not everything in my old file cabinet was rubbish, however. One bright orange folder labeled “New Stories” turned out to be a lot of fun.

Writers come up with story ideas all the time, and when I first got into writing as a full time thing, I jotted down every little thought. Some turned into stories, some turned into books, and many got put away in this folder for later. Now it’s much much later, and many of these keepsakes I’d totally forgotten.

The first thing I see is not a page but a photograph of a quaking aspen we encountered on a trip through the Grand Canyon. One morning, I came up with a story that I told out loud, about a pair of crows who lived in the aspens, about how they became trees, or maybe it was the trees who became birds. Since I didn’t write it down, I’m not sure. Whichever it was originally, it later became the inspiration for a sequence in my sci-fantasy Cat Autumn where Niva space-shifts and becomes a tree.

The next are typed and stapled pages from even longer ago when I took a creative writing class at PCC. These go back to before I was writing books. The comments from the teacher are revealing.

A little later in my writing career I became interested in short fiction and flash fiction. One named “Shoot the president!” jumps out at me. A Nixon-era flashback, it has resonance when I wrote it in 2017.

Next page: The Four Noble Truths

Then dreams.

Then a quote from one of my favorite books, Gormenghast, by Mervin Peake.

There are a lot of lamentations about anxiety—too many.

A cast list for a book I never published.

A note about that time when I was working for UPS and went to an apartment that smelled like rotting flesh. Ewww…

A newspaper clipping: Hawking reverses his controversial black hole theory, 2004.

A story idea about a serial killer who displays the murder weapon in the window of his room.

The very first notes for my published short story, The Dream Spinner.

Will anything come out of my rediscovery of these old story ideas? Your guess is as good as mine.