Annalisa Crawford, Author
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  • About the author
  • Books
    • Cat and The Dreamer
    • That Sadie Thing
    • Our Beautiful Child
    • You. I. Us
    • Grace & Serenity >
      • Grace & Serenity: Reviews
    • Small Forgotten Moments >
      • Small Forgotten Moments: Reviews
    • The Clock in My Mother's House
  • Short Stories
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Spring cleaning

12/4/2016

 
I'm not usually a hoarder. If you look around my house, there are a few over-crowded shelves and there's a cupboard that doesn't shut properly, but nothing a quick straightening can't fix. But one thing I've always done is keep old drafts of stories and novels.

​Last night, while having a major procrastination session, I sorted out my filing cabinet. In some cases, I had six, seven or more copies of the same story. Worse, some of those copies were exactly the same. So I started to shred... and shred... and shred.​
Picture
I found some gems - a handwritten first draft from a story I published in 1996, and a few fantastic openings or random lines that I'd forgotten about, which have already sparked some ideas.

​But most of all, I found space. All I have to do is write enough to fill it back up again!

​It was quite interesting to go back over some very old work. Some of it was awful - terrible - and it was reassuring to see how far I've come since I started. I kept a couple of those early stories, but threw out the rest - sometimes there's no point holding onto things that don't work anymore. I haven't quite brought myself to shred the novel I keep ​returning to (yes, 20 years later, and I'm still considering re-working it again), but I think I have to. For my sanity, if nothing else.


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Annalisa Crawford, Author

Dark contemporary fiction with a hint of paranormal
​"Besides Annalisa's clever writing style, I enjoy the unpredictable plots and the characters that are so very normal, yet tragically broken in some way or another."