Fan fiction and You.

[Farseer]

Truth and brilliance. Sheer brilliance. Also the best writing advice I think any writer could ever be given.

Thanks for sharing, AR, as I haven't got back to reading the rest of the session as yet.

I, like you, mourn the loss of past writings. I carried almost my whole life in the form of so many, many stories, jottings, poems and diary entries around with me for years, always careful to protect them, add to them as each year went by, later copying them in both paper and digital formats to ensure that I would never lose them. Then, I destroyed them all.

During one extreme low point of my life some years back, I decided (stupidly, oh so stupidly!) to try and sever my present and future from my past and thus swept the lot into our burning drum and set them all alight...and all that after I had erased the existence of every letter or word of their digital twin.

It was symbolic but not sane. Nothing can erase the past. I knew it before I made my attempt, but I attempted it anyway.

How much easier it would be for me to write now, if I still had all that to draw on! While I can still remember the experiences, they are coloured by my feelings and experiences since, and while I can sometimes recall some of the things that I had recorded, such as poems that had been embedded in my memory for so long, they are like the memories that follow in the wake of a Skill dream...there in fleeting clarity but then gone with the wind, with only the memory of them to tease me.

Be certain that I have kept every single piece of writing my own children have ever done, lest they decide to hold their own bonfire sometime in the years ahead!

Such a perfect illustration, to use Zorro and Batman!