(no subject)

[darchildre]

So, I'm probably going to go get my new bed tomorrow, so I'm cleaning out under the present one in preparation. Holy gods, but I have a lot of yarn. 75% of it is going away, you'll be happy to know. I also found (of course) a hell of a lot more books. Some of them are going away, too - either to Goodwill or paperbackswap. Most of those are books that I'm not even sure why I still have - I thought I'd gotten rid of them years ago but no, they've just been under my bed.

Other things are harder to part with. For example, I found my copy of the BBC Lord of the Rings. Which I have on my computer now and can listen to any time I want and the set I have is on cassette tapes and I don't need them anymore but my god, it's hard to get rid of them. What if the person who buys them from Goodwill doesn't love them? It's ridiculous, but it's still hard.

Also, I've apparently saved every notebook that I've owned since college. Some of them are from college. I find it very difficult to part with them, as they have snippets of stories in them. I've never been good at consolidating my stories and the Renfield stuff (for example) is scattered everywhere. Little scenes or snippets of plot-planning interspersed with math notes or the minutes from boring meetings at work. I should type them all up someday, so that I have them all in one place. Until then, I have to save the notebooks. I'm never going to show those stories to anyone but they're mine and they're important to me. I don't want to lose them. (I'm already devastated that I've lost my earliest Renfield stories, which were on our very first computer. I printed them all out before we moved from Delaware but they're long gone now.) Reading over them is occasionally embarrassing but also very pleasant. Those snippets are as much a picture of who I was when I wrote them as any journaling I did at the same time.

The problem is, where the hell do I keep the notebooks now?

Comments

[finch]

I thought I'd gotten rid of them years ago but no, they've just been under my bed.

God, does that sound like the months since my last move.

There's a couple of things I've done with notebooks that you might find helpful. Some of the best, where almost all the pages have character notes or journal entries or fiction, I just keep in a plastic bin. The rest, where its mostly class notes and fanfic I've long since typed up and posted and archived and so on, I cut out the good bits and file those pages. I've been thinking about scanning those pages too, but I haven't done it yet.

[draigwen]

My dad's still got the BBC recordings on cassette tape (at least he'd better have). I don't think I could ever bear to get rid of them if I had them myself. If I hadn't listened to the radio play I would never have gotten through the books!

Could you fit the books in a few boxfiles? They'd be far easier to store. I recently got rid of all my university notes - it was hard but after not looking at them for ten years I figured it was about time.

[tricksters_queen]

I too, am still in the act of attempting to figure out what to do with several of my older notebooks. ::laughter:: It's been a while, for some of them... I should look back through.