The Writer's Scrapbook

My “Monday” posts are slowly becoming “sometime-during-the-week” posts. Tuesday morning before 8 counts as Monday, right? It sure feels like it. In truth, I had a completed post ready to go last night, but I sat back and said, “This is boring.” So I had my wife read it just to be sure. She agreed a little too quickly, and I spend the rest of the evening sulking under the covers while she worked on our daughter’s 1^st Year Scrapbook.

     Scrapbooks are funny things. They’re basically just a collection of pictures with notes by them so you remember what the heck was going on that day you decided to pose with your foot behind your head, your tongue out, and a 5-foot tuna cuddled up in your lap. They’re conversation pieces and they’re a sort of lineage tracker in some ways… something you can sit down on the couch next to your kids with and talk about what life was like before you were stuck paying for their diapers, the tons of food they ingest, and that stupid pet they guilted you into buying because all the “good” dads that “loved” their children had bought them pets that cost more to maintain than a college education (I use the word maintain purposefully because I do not care for or nurture pets).

     My wife has made a scrapbook for each year of our marriage and has almost completed this new one for our daughter, and the coolest thing about them is the page by page growth. It’s like we have this little tome that transports us back in time and holds our hand as we reminisce. Sure… pictures can do that. But scrapbooks do it better. I can flip a few pages back and see what I looked like without a beard (which is actually how I think of myself, even though I’ve had one for almost two years now), I can see the different stages of my hair, and I can watch my waistline expand over the course of a few pages. (Curse you McDonalds Monopoly Month!!!!)

     I’ve been thinking of taking all my old writing and putting it together in a writing scrapbook of sorts; all the notes and character ideas and shorts stories and even all that really bad poetry I wrote my freshman year of college. I don’t believe that any writing is ever wasted, except perhaps on “The Happening.” That was just awful. Even when I’m doing re-writes I don’t like the idea of just tossing the old copy out. For one, there might be a gem or two in there that – while it didn’t seem to work for this piece – might go nicely with that idea I had for a zombie musical or something. Second, it shows how much I’ve grown and how much I’ve changed. Back in 2001 I started writing a book; just started writing away on what would eventually become my world. I got as far as the first chapter before spending the next few years just working on the world as a whole. But that story is the same tale as my current work: the tale of Polas Kas Dorian (no… that’s not what I’m calling it). Granted, that first chapter was almost an exact copy of the first chapter of Elvenbane by Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton, but it helped to lay the ground work. I even went through a haiku phase. In fact, I have the outlines for six or seven novels summed up in to three lines of 5-7-5. Sure, most of that old stuff is really really bad, but, in most cases, it’s my foundation. It’s something I can pull out every once and a while and remind myself of how much I’ve grown and sometimes even find something great that I had dismissed after first writing it down. Like that scrap of paper that has “Mareness will protect them” scrawled across it. That’s all it says, but dang… it really makes me want to know about Mareness, who she’s protecting, and what the heck she’s protecting them from.