What do you keep hidden in your drawers? - Debbie Bennett

Since last month I wrote about my glory box, I thought that this month, I’d delve into my filing cabinet and see what I can find to entertain you with. I got my little grey filing cabinet from the office at work. Really I did – the civil service building I was working in was closing down and they were getting rid of the furniture. Sealed bids for everything and I liberated a filing cabinet, a kitchen table and a large rubber plant.

The bottom drawer is household stuff. Bills, personal documents, insurance and general household paperwork. The top drawer holds all my literary bits and pieces:

1) Copies of various FantasyCon event programs I edited, designed and produced. Some of these had big print budgets from advertising space we sold to the big 6 publishers.

 
2) A copy of Bella magazine circa 1993 containing my very first paid publication - a short story which they completely butchered while "editing". My character was a painter - they turned her into a gardener - why? It had no relevance to the actual plot. The story in question is called Maniac and is the title story in my collection (you can read it for free as it fits into amazon's sample).
 

3) Stacks of old manuscripts. Now here is where it gets interesting! First we have a lovingly hand-written pile of unpublishable poo. In mitigation, I was about fourteen maybe, when I wrote this and it's a thriller of sorts, dripping with teenage angst, cardboard villains and plastic heroines. Things such as plots, points of view and story arcs were completely unnecessary in my little make-believe world. But it kept me amused. Then we have an even-more-lovingly typed (on a manual typewriter) sequel, which is marginally better - I guess I learned something from the handwritten rubbish, as it seems to have a little more structure to it. And finally we have my first foray into genre fiction with an sf novel set on a future post-apocalyptic earth. This one's on computer too, though I doubt I still have the files or if they'd be readable. Again unpublishable but it does have a few redeeming qualities in that there are one or two ideas I may re-use some day and I'm fairly sure some of the characters have been reincarnated into other stories.

So I have maybe quarter of a million words of "apprenticeship" writing, where I learned the skills needed to create something that other people might actually want to read (and pay money to read). It's fascinating looking back on it now and seeing how far I've come. And these days, I write things and immediately discard them - one hit of the <DEL> button and they are gone forever. It's not quite the same, is it?

www.debbiebennett.co.uk