Tonight I opened the top drawer of a four drawer file cabinet looking to see what books I had entered into contests last year...and fell into various folders, pulling half written stories, vignettes, handwritten pages, bits and pieces, and even a poem out and reading them, getting lost in them. The terrible thought that I don't have enough life left in which to finish all these stories nearly set off a panic attack!
I turned around and looked at the four drawer file cabinet across from the one I was digging through. Three drawers are crammed full of stories, some handwritten, some typed on an electric typewriter and not even on any computer in the house, and a few I know have been put on the computer...but they're few and far between. These are stories I wrote for Kelly when she was little, while she was growing up. Some are even older than that.
This all reminded me that someplace downstairs there is a binder full of poetry I wrote when I was in my teens and through my early married life in my mid-twenties, and a binder full of what they now call flash fiction that I wrote in high school and college.
I cannot believe I wrote all this stuff. I cannot quite wrap my head around the mountains of partial manuscripts and writings that I've thrown out through the years- stories I'm never going to be able to write again or even begin to recreate. All of them are long gone. Notebooks and binders and hundreds of reams of notebook paper are probably well rotted in the landfill now since I began throwing stuff out in the 1980's when my writing began to evolve from writing the same characters into different stories over and over again to creating new characters for each new story. In the early to mid 1980's I began writing to entertain other people, not just myself.
I still occasionally find myself writing the same characters into stories that vary somewhat, but that's now more a method of working toward writing them into the right story for them. Life Skills developed like that- a series of stories in which I developed the characters, their relationships, and their back stories. The series of short stories that connect are different from the finished novel, but if you were to track down the binder that they're in someplace in my house and you read them, you'd recognize Remy and Lissa, Flash and Blade, Uncle Max and Janet. The same sort of thing is happening with Garnet and Quella in the Memento Mori series first novel. I've written dozens of versions of their story...and while I've finished the novel once, and nearly finished it a second time, it's still not the exact story I wat it to be, so I'll be writing it again.
Writing is a circuitous journey sometimes as you explore the various paths your characters can take. sometimes it's not so easy to find the right path. You know when you're on it when you get that feeling of satisfaction and completeness after a read through. If you don't get that feeling- then it's not ready for anyone else to read it yet.
I found some pieces and poems my late playwright friend and mentor, Jim Curran, gave me in the same drawer tonight. I wish he had lived to see me develop my skills more, see me publish some of the stories he enjoyed reading in his final years. Although he was Irish, his love of Princess Grace and Monte Carlo and France spiced my writing with a decidedly French flavor. Some of those sweet romance stories that he enjoyed were included in the anthology Auspicious Beginnings (here's an insider tidbit- Kelly named this book!) I was so fortunate to have such a wonderful mentor who encouraged me to write from my heart and soul. His Monte Carlo racing windbreaker is in my closet. Some of his Belleek Irish china is in my china cabinet. My brother snagged these things for me from his estate sale.
It was a nice night to reminisce about my roots as a writer, but a little unnerving to realize that I will never be able to finish everything I've started writing before I exit this world!
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