> NEVER throw away, delete, or get rid of something you've written.

Wow. This is exactly my attitude. I still have reams of stuff I wrote in high school, much of it I had to retype to get it from my Apple II to my PC in order to preserve it. (I preserved the typos, too.) Most of it isn't very good from an objective standpoint, but to me, personally, they're priceless.

I don't understand professional authors that make a point to burn whatever they write that doesn't turn out well. The reasoning is something along the lines of ensuring that one does not dwell on the past or dally with what can't amount to something. But I don't understand that at all.

I'm getting off topic, though. I don't write "rant" files, but I have kept journals off and on. The last one I kept was in 1992, but the Site Journal and Message Forum here on RinkWorks go a long way toward documenting events in my life and my perspective on it. There is a reason that I haven't started archiving or deleting old site journal entries or forum posts. I'd never delete anything (at least not posts I hadn't seen fit to delete in the course of moderating the forum), and I wouldn't download and archive it away unless disk space concerns left me with no other choice.

On the other hand, Dave, while he does not believe in actively throwing away old things he's written, has lost some early work over years of moves, account transfers, and so forth. I'm pretty sure he regrets it. At the very least, *I* do.

S "another keeper of things" am