Had to go through my email, today. Had to clean the sucker. And to see if there was any mail from someone; a certain someone I don’t want to get messages from.

In the process of deleting all the credit card offers, offers to lower my credit card payments, more offers for more credit, and, of course, the pitches for great car loans, I came across something AMAZING. It was in the SENT files. It was a large SENT file to an editor I had contacted back in 2013.

Attached to the file were a dozen or more Documents I had sent to him. – My writing. I sent it to him with the desperate plea of seeing if he could do anything with the work. Included with the Short Stories & Poems was my first Novel – and it had been edited! That’s right. With a billion red lines slashing through my half-crazed sentences, & red words & letters going over & covering one another like some grotesque Marqui de Sade orgy, there was my novel. Edited to a disfigured point of unrecognizable obscurity.

But I have a copy of it!

All 255 pages of her are here, with me… well, with the Electronic & Digital Gods of online heaven.

It was something I thought I would never see again! Mangled with improvement? Sure. I can call it that. But: point being, I have her.

I used to pages & pages & pages of writing. All of it I thought I would never see or read again. The other work, the Poems & such are an added delight. But they are just sprinkles on the sundae. My delecious triple scoop is that novel. I spent the better part of two years working on it.

And, oh, I worked hell on it. At that time in my life, I felt writing that manuscript was the most important thing I had to do. Forget college. That was secondary. My job at the bookstore was entertainment.

No, no.

It was the Novel that had me.

In all honesty, it’s not that good.

But it was the first big thing I had ever written. One of the first things I did that I was dedicated to.

Whenever the printer is figured out here on the Compound, I’ll print it. Having a physical copy seems important, even if it’s just to gather dust in a drawer.