All of mine is in an old steamer trunk separated into file folders named Songs, Short Stories and Poems
Hell, I know I’m no one’s Hemingway, but this is stuff I thought up and saved, and maybe at some time in the future it may have some meaning.
Guess I could put it on some disks, right? (Assuming there’s not gonna be a nuclear war and no way to run 'em).
So how are y’all saving your stuff so that it will be readable in the year 2525?
Thanks
Q
I post it to message boards.
For a long time, my storage device was posting poems on usenet.
For all I know, there are still some I haven’t found and can’t remember.
Really old stuff from my typewriter days is storied in manuscript boxes packed into a larger cardboard box that is currently either in the back of my bedroom closet or up in the cats’ room/storage room–I’m not sure which, but I stumble across it once in awhile when I’m searching for other things stored in similar boxes.
Anything from the computer age is in WordPerfect or plain text files, stored here on the C: drive and/or disks, and if posted online may also be archived on various sites.
Moleskine.
I’m lucky enough to have some of my work “saved” in a row of story anthologies sitting above my desk.
The other 99.999999% of unpublished work is on CD, and going further back, floppy disks, and even further back, binders of actual paper. I have written short and longer fiction, poems, and I used to write songs. I still haven’t got it together enough to produce a novel.
We have my husband’s late grandmother’s writing, and that was not how to save things: illegible scraps written on whatever bits of paper were handy, folded up, and stuffed into envelopes, which she then wrapped in plastic wrap like a word sandwich, then taped up.
The long-running goal of my life is to have a row of very neat black binders that will sit tidily on a long shelf, beneath the published stuff.
One day.