Just made the discovery - an old discovery, if there is such a thing - that I can access the Internet Archives for old ads. I've seen a lot of them on YouTube, of course, but there are always discoveries. With my "new" Imgur program, I can make gifs out of these videos, which is nice because I DO get weary of the limitations of YouTube.
I'm also thinking of other things. The other day I was thrilled to have retrieved part of a document I had deleted in a fit of - what, disgust? This was an over 1000-page "story" I'd been working on, on and off, for a year or so. I was writing it only for myself. This isn't the first time I've done something like that, written a lot of stories for myself, then gotten fed up and deleted them. Now I want them all back. But this time, by some miracle, I accessed a number of "rescued files", though only 800 or so pages was there.
Then my magnificent husband said, "I backed up all your stuff a few months ago. It might be there." Most of it was, to my amazement. But I hadn't looked at it in a very long time, and reading it over gave me the strangest feeling. Now I wonder whether I want to continue.
It's not edited, it's repetitive, etc. and I make no attempt to polish it or make it "good", but there are chunks of raw story that I DO think are good, as are some of the characters. For the first time, just this moment in fact, while slapping up my usual fusty old '50s ad gifs, I'm wondering about posting some of it. I don't even have a title for the damn thing! Chrysalis, which is the name of the organization in this thing, sounds too science-fictiony. Originally it was called Climbing the Wall.
My rule for it was "no work". Don't put pressure on myself: just write. Don't be professional. Writing Harold gutted me, or at least the heartbreak of another failed novel gutted me, so I will never put myself through that again.
I don't want this to suddenly be "work", and I don't even know if I want to continue and try to make up the 100-or-so pages (?) that were truly lost.
But I wonder if this sudden thought is a way of getting myself writing again, meaning writing something that another set of human eyes might see.
I don't know.
