Kerry Allen

I went into the filing cabinet to scavenge for paperclips (because the 5000 I bought a month ago seem to have vacated the premises, as paperclips are wont to do).

Which filing cabinet? That filing cabinet that has such sensitive stuff in it, I keep it not only locked but barricaded with an enormous, overpriced, gutted computer that started blue-screening right out of the box but Dell lied about the return deadline and kept me in tech-support hell until it was too late and…

But I digress. Does this filing cabinet contain vital documents, birth records, fake IDs? Uncensored government reports pertaining to Roswell? Severed body parts of former boyfriends? No, no, and no (well, maybe one).

It’s the WIP cabinet. And not just any WIPs: the ones I can say with absolute certainty will never be finished and will never allow anyone to lay eyes upon without personally ensuring that they take my shameful secrets to the grave with them. (That muddy shovel is just for decoration, honest. I got it from the Toscano catalog.)

This stuff really needs to be shredded and then burned and then scattered in various remote locations to eliminate any possibility of reconstitution, but it’s kind of like a monstrously deformed baby in a gothic novel: you might lock it in a tower and conceal its existence from the townsfolk, but you don’t kill it.

Unfortunately for me, I am unable to touch paper with words on it and not look, so I ended up engrossed for hours in some of the most hackneyed tripe you can possibly imagine.

I am referring, of course, to ye olde regency family saga. (Yeah. The historical hater writing regency. This was a loooooong time ago.) I had a dissipated second son, the responsible firstborn (who had the most mindblowing sex scenes—it’s always the quiet ones), and yes, of course, a pirate! A feisty independent American heroine, a victimized heroine, and a plucky younger sister heroine. A meddling curmudgeon of a grandmother. Misconstrued contact with other women. Ebil kidnapping pirates! Greedy father arranging compromising position to trap rich lord into marriage!

A veritable cornucopia of cliche! I may have neglected to mention one or two, but I assure you, every single one of them is in the material. It’s very 80s. No chance it would fly with even the most indiscriminate reader today.

Why don’t I do the world a favor and dispose of this drivel? Well, it may be a huge stinking pile of manure, but I found, as I was shoveling through it and alternately giggling and gagging, that the livestock had been grazing in a pasture strewn with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and even the occasional diamond.

Yes, Virginia, there are gems buried in the crap. Little snippets of snappy dialogue. Some high-quality sex. The guys? I still like the guys. (The gals kind of annoy me, though. You know, if they’d let their men out of the dog house long enough to explain, they could get on with the happy, but there’s another hundred pages to go, so we must remain stubborn and bitchy.) Some of that icky emotional stuff that I really suck at but occasionally manage to pull off, so I definitely need to preserve those passages.

Mining out the gems is a monumental task, and I freely admit to being lazy. So I packed everything back in the drawer, hoping it will eventually decompose to a more manageable size. Until then, I am compelled to hold onto the shit.

No, no, that’s the wrong attitude.

It’s not shit. It’s fertilizer, from whence verdant fields of evocative prose shall one day sprout and flourish.

*snort*