December 2006
Mark and I were living in Springville, Utah, in a beautiful four-bedroom house that I wish we still lived in. :::sigh::: Because of all of our space, we hosted Christmas. My parents drove out from Arkansas to spend the holidays with us. My other sisters were already in Utah. Since they were driving, my parents also loaded their van up with boxes and boxes of our stuff. You know, the stuff you 'accidentally' leave at home when you grow up and move away. Oops.
I had recently started writing again. In June of 2005, I sat down and wrote a fantasy novel, Branca, which has yet to see the light of the publishing world. But it had awakened something in me. I'd often mentioned that little book I wrote in junior high to Mark, but I had lost the diskette years before.
After my parents left, I sat down in the downstairs bedroom and started opening boxes. In one giant box, I found piles and piles of printed pages. Drafts. It was a chaotic mess. I even found pages of the original, hand-written first draft. Wow. I began to try and piece together the latest draft, thinking I might, just might, get up enough enthusiasm to retype the whole thing.
Inside the big box was a shoebox with letters in it. I opened up the shoebox and pulled out an envelope with a blocky shape in it. What could this be? I pulled out a diskette and my heart jumped into my throat. Written in red pen (because you couldn't use pencil on diskettes), in the tilted letters of a child's handwriting, were the words, "Tammy's story."
Don't try and call me 'Tammy' now. We won't be friends.
I freaked. Like, total excitement. I ran up two flights of stairs (multi-level house) and into the computer room. My heart pounded with anxious excitement as I pushed that disk into the a:drive of our old computer. (Anyone still have an a:drive?) I had to open it in a plain text file because whatever program I'd used to create it didn't exist anymore.
There it was! It opened! I couldn't believe it. After ten years. I'd thought the file was lost. I thought, what the heck. I'll see if I can make anything good out of this. (I am absolutely dying from temptation right now. I so very badly want to show you that first page. It's nothing like what it is now! But, I can't. I'm not allowed to.)
Sequel Stats:
today's goal: 47,080
actual: 47,306
tomorrow's goal: 49,306
3 comments:
Thats exactly what I did 2 weeks ago at my parents house in Montana, I went into the basement and grabbed all my old drafts of a million different adventure stories and brough them back to Utah.
I don't think there is hardly anything of use anymore but it is still exciting to have them.
Did I mention that Mark is from Montana? Where do your parents live?
Wow!
how exciting to find that :)
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