Surfaces darling...

At heart I'm a minimalist. In reality, I'm a pack-rat.

A case in point being that I recently celebrated my seven year anniversary living in the gorgeous Hawke's Bay after moving from Auckland. Seven years, plenty of time to unpack all those boxes, right? And yet there are more sealed and carefully labelled cardboard boxes in the garage than there have any right to be.

Throw them out I hear you say. Donate them to charity. Give the contents to family. All well in theory, but I know as soon as I do, that I'll desperately need the very thing I've purged. I Know, I've had it happen before. On more than one occasion.

I'm the same with murdered darlings from early drafts of novels. Carefully deleted and pasted into a document that will never see the light of day. I doubt many authors are cavalier enough to blithely cut those passages that, while perfectly formed, aren't required to move the story forward.

From the authors I've spoken to, most are like me in that they'll cut and paste those unwanted words into a document and save it. I'm sure we all intend to use them at some time in the future. As to whether we do, that's a different story, one chock full of murdered darlings.

Perhaps I'll work on a story that has them all in there together. The ultimate in recycling if you like?