Do You Wanna (Jump Jump Jump?)

There was no post here yesterday because I spent most of the day playing with my new toy. A USB floppy disk drive. 

I know! Boring, right? I mean, a floppy disk drive? When was the last time anyone got excited about one of those? The 1980s? It's not like I'd gotten my hands on something super high-tech and modern like, oh, I don't know, a 3D printer...

It all started back in the summer, when I was doing a whole load of stuff around the house. I was making some of our less-cared-for rooms useable again, going through stacks and piles and boxes of assorted kipple I hadn't looked at for decades. As I was moving things from one place to another I came across a box of disks. 

I didn't have a clue what they were. Of course they weren't labelled, not in any meaningful way. That's not really something I do. A few of them said things like "Docs" or "Docs 2". Not really all that informative, although marginally more so than the labels where I'd helpfully written my name and nothing else.

I also came across some of my zines from the same period. I keep most of those in one place but I produced a lot of zines over a couple of decades. New ones tend to surface now and again. 

I thought about it for a while and it occurred to me that although I'd done a lot of those zines either on my Amiga or at work, there'd been a few years when I'd written some of it on my first PC, which I got sometime in the mid-90s. That could be what was what was on the disks.

One thing I've wanted to do for a long, long time is to get some, maybe all, of what I've ever written digitized and stored online. Why? I have no idea. There's really no point. It's not like anyone's ever going to see it, let alone read it. Let alone care. 

It's just that I have this kind of science fiction fantasy; some cyber-archeologist stumbles across the files, hundreds of years from now, the way academics discover bundles of old papers in attics or storerooms. The relics don't have any value in and of themselves but they offer a fragment, an echo, of how the ancients might have lived. That sort of thing. I've maybe read too much science fiction. 

I wrote some once, too. Two longish pieces around about that time. The nineties. I've never been much of a fiction writer. I fancy I can do the style and the surface pretty well and I'm not too shabby at the substance, or I think so anyway, but plots defeat me and as for ideas...

Y'know that thing writers always bitch about? The one question they get asked all the time, the one they really hate: "Where do you get your ideas?". Well, there's a reason people ask and it's a good one. We have no freakin' clue how anyone could come up with even one good idea for a story, let alone keep coming up with them, time after time.

I certainly never could. Let someone give me an idea, the way they do in school or on writing courses, and I'm away. I could give you five thousand words on pretty much any topic you cared to name (don't try me!), fiction or non-fiction. Come up with something of my own. though? Never gonna happen.

If I could do that thing where you go back and tell your younger self something they ought to know (yeah, you can't but you hear it so many times you'd think you could) I'd tell me... well, okay, a lot of things I'm not going to tell you, but also that maybe younger me ought to consider a career in journalism, like that geography teacher, who'd done a weekend course on careers advice and made me fill out that multiple choice test that one time, said I should. 

And also I'd have made a great ghost-writer. That's got to be easy money.

Still, everyone who writes thinks they can write fiction and even those who know they can't think they ought to try. So I tried. I ended up with maybe fifty thousand words of one and thirty-five thousand of another. I ran them all through the collective I was part of at the time and I can't say the reaction was all that but everyone was doing it and the competition was hot. Some of those people were pretty good or I thought so, then. Not that any of them made anything of it, at least as far as I know. 

Anyway, I got it out of my system, which was most of the point of doing it, and then before I'd even finished either of the projects (let's call them "projects"; it takes some of the sting out of it) I'd discovered EverQuest and that was pretty much that for writing about anything but games for a decade or so.

I have all that prose on paper, safely tucked away. I was considering scanning it and posting it because part of the whole thing was how it looked. That zone culture was very visual. I might still do that.

Then as I was thinking about those floppy disks I'd found it came back to me that I'd most likely written some of the longform stuff on that first PC and I thought I even remembered transcribing the rest so I'd have it all in one place. Maybe that was what was on the disks.

It would certainly save me a whole lot of work. I could just pull the files and pump them into the cloud. Job done. Posterity assured. Kind of like having my ashes sent into space. About that meaningful and permanent.

I had a bunch of FDDs I'd ripped out of old PCs. I thought about installing one of those but I looked into it and it seemed like way too much trouble so I checked out the 2020 options and put a USB floppy drive on my wishlist. And this weekend I got one.

It was supposed to come with an installation CD and it didn't. I plugged it in anyway and it lit up but the PC didn't seem to notice. I tried sliding a disk in and it made a lot of chewing noises but nothing happened. I thought I was in for a long day but five minutes with Google got me a simple workaround that did indeed work so I set to going through the pile.

There weren't that many disks. Maybe a dozen. More than half of them were blank or had nothing but old gamesave files or weren't recognized but four or five of them were filled with treasures. Stories I'd completely forgotten I ever wrote. Reviews of gigs by bands I couldn't recall ever having seen and movies I thought I hadn't cared about at all but apparently I'd really, really loved.

If I was an actual writer with a body of work, one of my defining tropes would be an obsession with how memory works. It fascinates me, as it has for as long as I can remember. Maybe. Who knows? Not me, that's for sure. It's not like I can remember what I remember and what I can't, is it? That's kind of the point.

But I can read. And reading what I thought about something, as recorded by me, not so too very long after I thought it, opens a door to the past in all the ways memory can't, doesn't, never did and never will. 

So I spent half the day not just going through the disks to find out what was on them but also reading most of it. It was engrossing, exhilarating and disheartening. It's one thing to go through your old stuff and realize how embarrassingly naive or dully tedious it was but it's another to find it all so much better than anything you can imagine doing now. 

I was in my late thirties when I wrote this stuff and I'd been writing non-stop for over twenty years, then. If I ever had any powers I was probably at the peak of them. Also, drink and drugs do make you write better, whatever people tell you.

I found an app that could read the files and display them with all formatting, so they looked as I'd originally meant them to look, which turned out to be more important than you'd think, as I discovered when I ported some of the pieces into Blogger and took a look at them there.

Blogger seemed like an ideal storage option. It holds everything in the cloud and you can import and export text files at will, so if and when Google decides to shut Blogger down it'll be convenient to move to another home. Easier than using the fiddly FDD, anyway.

Also, I was considering the possibilities. I have a blog. I could post the stuff. Some of it, anyway. I previewed a couple of pieces to see how that would go and guess what? They read very differently as white text on a blue background in a single, centered column than as black text on a white background, full screen. Also the font I use in Inventory Full doesn't feel right.

In the previews it all seems flatter, emptier, less impactful. It doesn't land. It doesn't connect. It maintains a distance. It's the single most effective reminder I've given myself in a long, long while on something I ought to know: style is substance.

The way this blog looks is just right for what I do now but it would be completely wrong for what I did then. Which means I might be about to do what I've so often thought of doing. I might be about to start a second blog.

It wouldn't be anything I'd expect other people to read. At first I thought I might just set it to "private", which is a peculiar option you get in Blogger, to make a blog no-one can read but you. Then I realized that all of this stuff was written to be shared and has been already. It was all created with an audience in mind, albeit a very specific audience, almost all of whom I knew or at least had met.

I'm still mulling over options. Nothing may come of it. It might be too much work. I might go off the idea. I'm not entirely sure all of this is stuff I want to leave lying around on the web for just anyone to happen upon. 

Conversely, it might excite me too much. I could end up growing into the new space, filling it not just with the past but with the present and the future. It could run away with me. Or from me. Or over me.

We'll see. I'll see. For now, some of the stuff is at least up there, behind the curtain, in draft form. I also got a new printer/scanner last week so maybe I will scan those old zines and make them available, looking something like how they were meant to look.

Whatever I decide, if I decide, I'll be sure to mention it here. Feel free to ignore me. Like anyone needs permission for that.