Old Tales

 I’ve been writing a long time.  At least half-a-century.  From a small town I had no idea how to get published.  I never even tried.  My career steered me away from submitting my fiction.  That doesn’t mean I wasn’t writing.

Even since 2009, when I published my first short story in my late forties, I’ve been writing them on my computer.  Some of them the software has evolved so much that it can’t read.  And there’s really quite a backlog.  And that doesn’t count the stacks of paper manuscripts in my attic.

I’ve been trying to sort these old files.  I do this when I hit a dry spell.  And again software works against me.  You see, I initially write in Scrivener.  Publishers want things in Word, but since I use a Mac that means Pages, converted at the last second.

My older Pages documents can’t be read.  (This is only since 2009, mind you, less than twenty years!  The handwritten paper that’s even older is still quite legible.)  On a day off work, I tried to figure out which Scrivener files had been sent to Pages.  Since I don’t trust electronics, I print them out.

But my printer no longer communicates with my computer because the software’s been updated.  Tech is such a bitch.  In any case, this sorting underscored again just how many unpublished stories I’ve got.

Some of them I read and can’t remember writing.  Some are quite good, others not so much.  Some definitely could be published if anyone else thought like me.  I sometimes think of starting my own literary journal.  But I have a job and a mortgage.  Thus dreams die.

What really strikes me is just how many stories I’ve written that nobody else has ever seen.  If they get thrown in the dumpster when I die a large part of me will be lost.  And I’ve been writing for a very long time.