Cleaning the Office 1: The Wayback Machine Goes Into the Recycling

So I’m cleaning my office because it’s become a dumping ground, and because I’m combining it with the home office I thought would be such a good idea kept separate (not), and because I need to paint the floor, and because I need to get serious about finishing this book and for that I need a working laser printer. No, there won’t be day-to-day pictures, I did that once before and my office this time it too vile to photograph. This past couple days, I’ve been going through files because really, how much paper do you need stacked around? and I’m finding a lot of stuff from my past. It’s my own Wayback Machine, and some of the stuff I’d forgotten completely, for good reason. Among other things, I found my first feeble attempts at fiction, most of which is now in blue recycling bags, but which showed me a lot about who I was then and how little I knew. (That’s okay, everybody starts someplace.)

I think most readers have casual thoughts about writing their own stories, even if it’s just to fix the dumb mistakes in books they’re reading. Most of my earliest stuff was like that, not seriously pursuing a writing career or even serious about writing, just messing around. And boy howdy was it was derivative. There was my Rex Stout knockoff short story with an older stay-at-home detective (a thin, wheelchair-bound professor) and her smart-mouthed research assistant which was just unpleasant, plus a terrible mystery; after I finished it I still wasn’t sure what had happened. There was the start to my Gothic novel . . . oh, dear, god, was that bad. There was something that I’m not sure I understand–maybe a historical with Irene Adler’s niece?–that was truly terrible. And they were all almost illegible because they were typed. I got my first computer around 1987, so you know this stuff was old. I try not to criticize myself for anything non-harmful I did in the twentieth century because it’s like slanging another person, I was so different then. So this stuff was from somebody who wasn’t taking fiction seriously–well, I was an art teacher, so it wasn’t really in my skill set–and who was just exploring ideas. Still, nothing I want anybody to ever see, so it all went into the recycling bin.

Also sometimes in the late seventies, early eighties, a friend of mine, Sandy Focht, dragged me to a fiction writing course at University of Dayton. Sandy was a lot more focused on writing than I was and she wanted company, and I was curious, so I signed up, too. I have two short stories from that class, and while they’re better, they’re also entirely predictable, nothing worth reading. Still, they didn’t make me cringe, so I stuck them into the folder labeled Wayback Machine. Mollie can throw them out when I’m dead.

The hardest part was reading the old letters I found, letters from before I was a cynical bitch. That Jenny must have been a nice person. They were the kind of thing that made me want to go back to her and say, “Listen, you’ve got some bad stuff coming, but you’ll be okay. Try not to be quite so trusting and believe in yourself more. There’s some amazing stuff coming, too.” She’d have probably smiled and nodded and kept on heading toward that cliff she was about to walk off of, but still.

So I think that’s going to be the worst of the Great Office Clean-up. Now it’s just finishing the bookcases I’m building and getting the laser printer set up (as soon as I find what I did with the damn cord) and clearing off the desk. Oh, and painting the floor, because right now it’s part plywood from where Richie covered over the stairs and it looks like hell. And putting up the shelves over the window. It’ll be awhile.

But at least I got my past into the recycling bin. That’s real progress.