Juvenalia

Growing up, my mother stuck to the 'siesta' tradition of her homeland: from about 3 until 5 every afternoon the house was dark and quiet. When I was about 11 I got into the habit of using that time for writing. It was mostly motivated by the fact that there was nothing else I could do in that time besides read, and I didn't like the whiplash feeling of reading for a few hours and then having to return to the real world. I wrote in lined journals, then transcribed them onto a massive PC that ran Windows 95 and had a keyboard that made a satisfying tackety-tackety-tackety sound, then spent a few months revising until I was satisfied enough to painstakingly format, print, cut, and bind the thing into a book neat enough to be lent to my younger siblings. They gave honest reviews, but they read them all. 

When that desktop finally died I copied everything I'd written onto floppy disks, transferred them onto the next computer. When that one died I copied them onto CD-Rs, because floppies weren't a thing any more, and did the same. 

Then, the year before I went to college, my brother managed to fry the motherboard. About that time is when I also got pretty sick, so I remember nothing from then apart from 'your brother fried the motherboard, everything's lost.' I had handwritten copies of about half of it, but I was too preoccupied with trying to get into college to really freak out.

Skip to last week, when I went to go chat with the archivist at the British Archive of Contemporary Writing. They'd heard from Henry that I'd kept my scripts from the MA and still wrote most things longhand, and were interested in borrowing whatever I was up for lending them, and I had a painful memory of the PC from 1996 going into the dumpster. I had also been wishing for a few months that I still had all the research on the Golden Age of Piracy that I'd done for the last novel I wrote before I went off to college, when I was about 19. But I was pretty sure that was all gone, so I didn't think any more of it.

Skip to today, when I went rummaging through my desk looking for a thumb drive to transfer my music from my old computer to my new computer, which I've been putting off doing since April. All of them are from when I started undergrad, and none of them are marked, so I plugged them in one at a time looking for one that had the capacity and functionality for music files. 

And I found a little black 8-gig that must have cost £60 when it was new. And I almost deleted the files unseen because I figured it didn't have anything important on it. Except I flicked through, just to check. And found a folder titled 'Juvenalia.'

I absolutely don't remember making that folder, or transferring my work from the floppies and the CDs onto a computer that had a thumb drive port. But it's all there, including the epic high fantasy novel I wrote when I was nine and thought I had deleted all copies of for the sake of sparing myself intense embarrassment in future. And I am so happy to get it all back.

I don't know if there's any moral to this story, other than 'Hollywood-calibre coincidences do happen in real life.' I'm looking forward to having a comb-through and seeing if any of it is usable, especially the hundred thousand words on piracy. And if all goes well, it will probably wind up in the Archive where anyone who wants to can have a poke-through.