na no wri mo · bo tro go so · mo flo

For about thirty years, it was never easier (and may never be easier again) to write that first million words. Because it was easy to let go of them. I have old stories in Wordstar and MacWrite, tucked away on broken hard drives, stored on floppy disks and microtape. 

Yes: even though the formats are largely proprietary and the physical medium difficult to find readers for, I could probably rescue some of these. But, like the old game files that got a serious mildew attack in the back of the closet, it is also easy to throw them away and not look back.

Before that, one had to depend on the manuscripts getting lost in a move to a new city (but they have a terrible habit of coming back to light again). In the very near future, we can probably look forward to the increasingly corporate IP-friendly internet structure losing the creative output of us mere lowly consumers somewhere in the Cloud.

Yes -- that is this morning's thoughts, as I prepare to donate my Kaypro IIx and my Convergent Technologies Workslate and my pair of Wallstreet Powerbooks to a computer museum (or, more likely, the local salvage yard). The last Frankenmac is gone already (this was the 6100 "pizza box" case with a 7100 mobo crammed into it and a G3 daughtercard on top of that.) Oh, but there's still a G3 box on the floor as I glean the last old files off its hard drive over Ethernet. And a couple of MacBooks (Aluminium and Titanium) I drag out to run sound designs on when I don't want to leave my main production computer at the theater.

Except that hasn't happened in a while. I promised my new job I'd give them a minimum of a full year. And that I had no plans of even doing a couple weekends on a design until the new year. 

So that's why the plan is still to toss out as much of the random sound gear, the stuff I kept for emergencies, the stuff I never get around to sorting and testing, the stuff that I already know is broken.

Along with cartooning and drafting supplies, prop-making supplies, old synthesizers (I still have a JV880 and a Roland W30 cluttering up the place)...and any of that first million words I find lying around in physical form that I can bring myself to toss.