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A Visit to the Manuscript Graveyard

© Roxianne Moore

Reflections on unfinished manuscripts as I pack up my belongings for a move

We've just finished moving into a new house, after spending almost seven years in a rented house. This was the longest I have ever lived in the same place in my life, and I was amazed at how much we managed to accumulate during our extended stay. Since we had previously moved about every two years, I'd had plenty of opportunities to sort through my belongings and toss out everything I no longer needed.

Well, almost everything. During my nineteen years of marriage, I've written a lot of articles, taught a lot of classes, and started a few novels. These I've carted with me from one house to the next, never gaining the courage to choose which should be kept, and which relegated to the dumpster. Some of these found a permanent home in my four-drawer filing cabinet, while others found homes in file boxes that I stored, sometimes going through them to find something I needed for another project. In my heart, I knew these file boxes were merely a way station on their journey to the Manuscript Graveyard.

A while back, I was forced to undergo the tedious and somewhat unsettling process of recovering some of these files from a dying computer. Our last home had a damp basement, and over time the dampness damaged a box of old files, I went through them one by one, but managed to salvage very little. The water had soaked through the bottom of the box, so almost every page was dampened, and mold had grown during the weeks it took me to discover the destruction. Much of the box was filled with materials from the various classes I've taught, lessons and hand- outs I photocopied over and over but somehow never managed to transfer to my new computer. The rest of the box held manuscripts for four failed novels in various stages of completion.

I fired up the old computer, an ancient Amiga well past its prime. It still ran -- sort of. To start it, I had to pop the cover on the 40 MB hard drive, which had always been a bit balky, and spin it by hand. Once I got it running, though, the Amiga ran just fine. Since I doubted I'd get it running again, though, I printed out every single word-processing file on the system. Most of these once again found their homes in a file box, although I found a drier place to store them.

When it came time to move, I began the usual process of sorting through my belongings. I came

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