Stories You've Written That You Lost Somewhere Along The Way

[Gentleman_G]

I do stuff w/pen and paper before committing it to anything hi-tech. Even then, I have the means to correct it. Wouldn't you know it though? I still write in cursive.....it pisses people off. I still care about my schoolin'.

Hahaha, I recognize that
I don`t write it down with pen and paper anymore, but I did have a long spell where I wrote in cursive.

Back before I went to college I had written a story in a notebook, rewrote it, then rewrote it on the computer. Printed the 230 pages story and saving on ink, getting a HDD crash, losing the digital rewritten version. Last year I tried to OCR the printed one and due to the ink saving it was pretty ... badly recognized.

Still, looking back at it it could use a rewrite. Would be funny if that`d end up becoming my first published book.

Lost a bunch of short stories as well, but I had printed those and given away to friends at that time as birthday presents. At least they appreciated them, making me wonder what they`d have thought of that completed novel.

 

[PuckIt]

Way back I actually tried the whole writing gig when it was all magazines and submissions mailed in with SASEs and I don't really remember what all was involved.

Sometime in the late '90s, I woke my wife up by setting off the smoke alarm burning the entirety of my works up to that point, including one self-help book, five novels, twenty-two short stories, and one hundred and forty-four poems. And threw in my foot long ponytail for good measure.

I don't know if I regret losing most of those, but there was some stuff in there I kind of wish I had or could recreate. But, meh. No one was interested in buying more than six of the poems, so it's probably no big loss.

Although, there was that one vampire novel that just wouldn't die! I'd burned it that night in the bathtub. I found a surviving copy tucked in a closet and tossed it in the dumpster. And when we lost our house and had to move to our ghetto fabulous duplex, I found the original little pocket-sized notebooks I'd originally handwritten it in. Thinking I'd finally freed myself from the curse, imagine my surprise when the kids were helping me go through things after my wife died and I found the disks with it saved. Gah! I swear to God after I'm dead and gone, someone will somehow find the damn thing. And probably publish it!

I wrote a couple of motivational pieces for the school newspaper at the commercial college I washed up in, but that was all the writing I did until I was reading on Lit one day and decided I had burned better writing than some of the stuff I was reading.

And proved just how wrong I was with my first nineteen efforts, each of which was formulated, typed up, and submitted within 24 hours. (Editor, my ass! I needed to slow the fuck down and actually proof it myself!)

Any road, even now I have a tendency to just scrap anything less than twenty or so paragraphs that don't seem to be going anywhere interesting. And occasionally even "completed" stories I just don't think are good enough to share.

And after how hard I had to work to get rid of Calvin Cooper and his horrid story, I go the extra mile and shred it for good measure.

 

[oggbashan]

I started writing my first long erotic story back in the 1980s on a machine running CP/M and a Ferranti word processing program. As I upgraded the hardware to an IBM PC and DOS and Wordstar 1512 - still on 5.25 floppies I transferred the story.

In 2002 when I started posting on Literotica it was obvious that the story, now about 12 Lit pages long, wasn't suitable for here. It was a full life biography starting from birth and featuring significant physical and sexual abuse.

I rewrote the story in the early 2000s. But I lost the original versions. I still have the drafts from about 2002 onwards but not the first story.

I miss it and regret losing it. By my writing standards now it was a poor story. I have used some of it in other stories and it features significantly in a story I've been intended to enter for Summer Lovin' for the last three years.

Every other story I have ever started and all I have completed are saved in multiple places. Losing that first story has had an impact on my back-up techniques.

 

[lovecraft68]

I do stuff w/pen and paper before committing it to anything hi-tech. Even then, I have the means to correct it. Wouldn't you know it though? I still write in cursive.....it pisses people off. I still care about my schoolin'.

My writing was so horrendous even I couldn't make it out the next day. Everything being on line is a book for me

 

[oggbashan]

My writing was so horrendous even I couldn't make it out the next day. Everything being on line is a book for me

My parents kept a piece of schoolwork I wrote when I was seven years old. It was the first writing of mine that they or my teachers could actually understand.

Very few written things of mine before wordprocessing were as legible as that seven-year-old's production. My secretary could read my scrawl but she preferred me to dictate or tell her 'you know what I want to say - type it and I'll sign it'.

My first word processor was part of a mainframe I was responsible for in the mid 1970s. The programme was crude and clunky but the printer typefaces were adequate. With that mainframe my secretary and I could produce 10,000 words a day if we needed to.

Since then I have rarely written anything in full by hand. If I do even I can't understand it if I try to read a day or two later.

 

[Captainnumnuts]

My writing was so horrendous even I couldn't make it out the next day. Everything being on line is a book for me

Whatever works for you. That's all that matters.

 

[Captainnumnuts]

My parents kept a piece of schoolwork I wrote when I was seven years old. It was the first writing of mine that they or my teachers could actually understand.

Very few written things of mine before wordprocessing were as legible as that seven-year-old's production. My secretary could read my scrawl but she preferred me to dictate or tell her 'you know what I want to say - type it and I'll sign it'.

My first word processor was part of a mainframe I was responsible for in the mid 1970s. The programme was crude and clunky but the printer typefaces were adequate. With that mainframe my secretary and I could produce 10,000 words a day if we needed to.

Since then I have rarely written anything in full by hand. If I do even I can't understand it if I try to read a day or two later.

I had an old brothers wordprocessor that doubled as a typewriter. Man oh man do I miss that thing sometimes. I've dealt w/the old HP mammoth computers as well - nice if you have all day, but really sluggish in a pinch. My 1st REAL typewriter was one of the 1st generation Selectrics w/the balls, the #3 being my pet favorite.

 

[YDB95]

The very first erotic story I ever wrote, about 20 years ago, was about a pair of opposite sex roommates who end up in bed together after one of them accidentally walks in on the other while she's in her underwear and he's naked. It was a pretty good first effort, as I recall. I think I probably do still have a copy somewhere, but at the moment I don't know where. I do plan to post it if it ever turns up.