Found two lost chapters!

I've been saying I've had two careers as a writer, but I've always been a writer, I guess.

My first career was from the late 1970's to the early 1980's when I had three books published, and three other books finished.  I also started at least two other books and got a fair way in before I quit.

Then...I started writing again about 3 years ago.

But just before I got serious, I'd also gotten a good start on two books which I had rather liked, but abandoned.  One book had five chapters, the other seven chapters.  One was missing the first chapter, and the other was missing the second chapter, which is pretty disheartening. 

I'd given up on them.

After spending most of the morning trying to find a way to recover lost files, I gave up and dug into my closet.

Now as most of you know, I have been writing a blog every day for 8 years now.  But before that I had been keeping notebook journals for probably 15 years before that.  I actually wrote more in those journals than I do on my blog.

I also found a couple of drawers full of random writings.

Once I started looking through my 'business journals' I discovered that there was quite a bit of fiction in there.  Just random things.  Some bad poems, some beginnings of stories.

But lots of it.  Some went 5 to 10 pages.

Thing is, I have absolutely no memory of writing most of them.  Some of them are pretty damn good starts.  Intriguing.

I also found a notebook which contained by some miracle the two missing chapters in the books I'd gotten a good start on -- they are in rough, hand written form, but they exist!  My subconscious must have realized this, because I really don't know why I started leafing through all the notebooks.

I think I can safely say I never really did stop writing -- I just didn't try very hard to finish anything.

Which is why it is such a rule of mine now.

I think I'm going to see if I can't recover some of this lost material on the side.  At least the two abandoned novels.  Why not?