Trash-ure Trove Dept.

Moving my system to a new set of hard drives gave me a good excuse to reorganize everything. My hard drives are a total digital Fibber's Closet: open the door and the bits spew out around your ankles and flood down the stairs. I keep entirely too much of everything.

That includes writing I tossed off and should have torn up a long time ago. I kept all of it, with the rationale that you never know when some particular piece of something will come in handy later — and if nothing else, it's a handy way to gauge your development over time.

That assumes, in both cases, that you bother to go back and read any of it. Some of what I wrote and saved, I did so at a time when I wasn't in the best of moods — and when you go back and read such material, it's a little like hearing a tape recording of you when you were drunk in a bar and saying vile things about the parentage of everyone sitting adjacent to you. None of that material was worth saving except for the sake of completeness, and none of it was the sort of thing I'd want to turn to for ideas or insight.

I know now that I always did my best, my most sustained, most readable and most worthwhile work when I was in a good mood and not a bad one. I've long since dumped the idea that the true artist needs conflict in his soul. The right outlook doesn't need constant battery from within to be kept alive. The world as we have it, taken with eyes open, is conflict enough.