Tracing the written past

[vaneramos]

A lot of my writing from the late 1990s has resurfaced today. I had assumed it was lost. I have fairly incoherent memories of my life from 1995 to 2002. I can't even remember the names of some of the men I dated, let alone what happened to old computer files. I hadn't seen any trace of them for years and assumed they had disappeared into a vortex.

As best I can recall, I used one desktop computer from 1995 until it died in about 2004. Then a friend gave me one of his, made of newer components. In about 2007 my parents gave me a laptop, and the desktop fell into disuse.

In 2012 I bought a new laptop for my business. Since then I haven't touched the 2004 desktop or the 2007 laptop. Danny has been using the flat screen for the past several years, but the old tower has just been collecting dust for five years.

Since we're getting ready to move, it's time to get rid of any useless computers. So I needed to scour them for any useful files. This morning I got the tower running (surprise, no problems) and transferred all the documents I could find to an external drive. Here I found my early digital photos, files from my old Geocities and other websites, articles written for Suite101.com around 1999 and things I posted to Themestream around the same time. This last website was where for the first time I started making friends with other writers online, like missprune. The file system is so labyrinthine, it's no wonder I thought I'd lost everything. And it's pricked with things I probably don't want to read, like angry letters written during the divorce.

The tower also has a 3.5" floppy drive I've never used, but this is my last chance to use it. I found a small box of floppies. More gold turned up here, including 576 poems written between 1994 and 2000, old joournal entries, bits of fiction, and most surprising of all: the old novel I had been working on since my teens, saved as text files on an even older computer in 1991.

The tower's USB port is unbelievably slow. The photos are taking hours to transfer. After this I'll check the old laptop, but I believe most of its vital files were already transferred at an earlier date. It's going to be another project to sort everything and figure out what's really worth keeping. That can wait, but hopefully not until next time I get a new computer.

The things I value the most are the old poems and pieces of fiction. Journal entries are also fascinating. There's often a difference between what I remember happening and what I wrote about it at the time.

Comments

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on finding your own buried treasure! I can imagine the happiness that inspired. Well, happiness about most of the contents you found.

And you even have online journals, like this one, where you can share some of this — in due time, of course.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

It's quite timely, too, as I've been trying to write some memoirs about some of the things I went through. I've submitted something to an anthology, so it will be interesting to see whether it gets published.

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

What a marvelous discovery. Very happy to hear that you were able to find all of this.