Scrap Paper for Life
I print rough drafts on the back of old manuscripts, as a way to reuse paper. Last month when I was down at my folks’ house, I brought back several packing boxes full of manuscripts from the unpublished spy novel I wrote senior year in high school / freshman year in college.
Wow–so much has changed since then. I found four or five full copies of the manuscript, the extras made by a copy shop. Many of them were in SASE envelopes sent back from publishers, several with brief comments. Nowadays of course, with laser printers most writers print their own full manuscripts; most send disposable copies instead of paying to get the whole thing sent back in a SASE; and big publishers don’t even take unsolicited subs, let alone hand-scrawl a note on the form rejection.
I also found eight or nine copies of the synopsis and sample chapters, and I read through bits of it all. So much has changed there too. :) The loose omni military-novel POV was pretty rough, the Sans-Serif font was hard to read, and my sample chapters were Ch. 2, Ch. 5, and Ch. 10.
I kept one full copy of everything for sentimentality’s sake, then stacked up the rest in my scrap paper pile. It’s taller than a five-ream box of printer paper, so I think I’ve got about 3000 sheets there. Which should keep me set for printing rough drafts for a long time!
