> 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.

I'm not nearly as meticulous (some might say "anal") as you are about documenting my life or keeping things of "sentimental" value. I don't keep movie stubs, I don't keep brochures of places I've been or anything like that. Heck, most of the time I lose *important* things, such as my car.

However, I do regret a little bit not being more careful with the stuff I've written in the past. The thing is, most of the "losing" of that stuff happened almost immedietly after it was created in the first place. I know you've said you've written somewhere between 70 and 80 short stories in your life. Me, I think if I could sit down (with perfect recall) and count every story I'd ever finished (or even any story I wrote more than two paragraphs of, for that matter) I'd be lucky if I'd actually written two dozen things, and that includes my two novels and the six or eight "books" I did in second and third grade. So it's not like there was really that much to lose in the first place.

And most of those old stories were started in notebooks. And I *hate* writing longhand. So I'd get about two, maybe three paragraphs in, get sick of writing, and just chuck it. Not thinking that ten to fifteen years later I might want to look back on those unfinished gems. :-) In fact, in my entire life I've only ever written one story out longhand and actually *finished* it, and that was in college when my girlfriend was sick and lying in bed one weekend and I had nothing better to do between trips to the kitchen to get her things. And that was only about 8 pages longhand, and it just about killed me. Although I do have to admit that I just recently discovered that I still have that original long-hand draft.

About the only thing I *really* regret losing I didn't really "lose". It was saved on a disk that got corrupted. That was the unfinished third installment in my "trilogy of short stories" that I wrote around 10th grade or so. The original story in that sequence was eventually expanded into my first novel (which sucked only slightly less than the original short story)

-- Dave