I found a time machine in my dad's house

No, not the Outlander sort, but the kind that comes in an old box in the back of a spare bedroom closet. Sunday afternoons mean going through things at the old family homestead, and this spare room used to be my room for a while, though now I'm quite comfy calling it "the middle bedroom" as my aunt has started tagging it. But that's another story.

The box was behind some other boxes, under an old duffel bag, so when I opened it like all the others, ready to sort into keep/sell or give/toss piles, I was surprised to find file folders. Okay, papers of Dad's? No, papers of mine. Onionskin typed pages. A file of fanfic ideas, the start of a spec script, and the first few pages of a historical I'd started years ago and then lost.

To be sure, I've improved a lot since those days, and I'm not doing fanfiction, but writing for the historical romance market. Still, there are a few things in there that I had lost along the way and am glad to have back.

My outline for the spec script was quite similar to the detailed outline format I thought I had only discovered this year. Who knew that I had it over a decade ago. Don't know what wiped it from my mind, but it worked then and works now. The historical pages reminded me how much I used to like to go for a big emotional impact right at the start, before I'd thought I had to ease into things, that what I wanted to do was too rough somehow, not nice, or what have you. Again, something I've come back to. It may have been a circular path, but I'm sure one that was needed.

Perhaps those earlier days were a scouting expedition of sorts. Maybe they were practice, or maybe seeds to be planted and harvested in their own time. I did take the files with me, to look over, see what I want to tweak, and what needs to go line a birdcage without delay. Not sure what will go where yet, but it did give me a much needed spark to keep on doing what I'm doing. Because nobody else can tell my stories for me.