My computers are dying.  I am off to get a new one next week if all goes well.  ALL HAD BETTER GO WELL, WORLD!  No sneaky car breakdowns requiring the computer money to be spent there instead!  No sudden animal disaster! 

In preparation for this event, I am tidying up the morass of files that proliferate in my life.  While working, I have a terrible habit of taking random notes on random other stories, then saving them under such useful file names as "Things" or "One" or "NWSDSCRD".  I promise to do better.  But in the interim, there's been a lot of poking through mysterious files.  It's a little like peek backs into my brain.  Some things make me groan.  Some things make me laugh.  Some things make me do both. 

The Things file turned out to be very brief in content, some tongue-in-cheek comment to myself to watch out for a writing habit and reads in its entirety:
 
"Things I’ve learned while writing:
There’s no problem that can’t be solved with defenestration.
       Maledicte
       Sylvie Shadows and Tooth & Nail
       Fanjadi escaping from her husband.
       Jax escaping his victim in To Cheat the Lords of Death.        
       Elizabeth Deal:  Strings, Sonata, and Suicide."

Basically, it's a list to remind myself to stop killing people by throwing them out of windows. 

The One file made me groan.  Apparently I had the start of a story and then... never bothered to go beyond the opening paragraph, so I have zero idea of what the plot might have been.  I do know that the character here shares a name, an occupation, and potentially a setting (? Artificial wind?)  with the main character in my short story Scorpion's Wake.  So maybe it was a prequel?
 
"Epiphanies lurk in every life, waiting to be noticed.  For Cyn, that moment came in a night-dark alley, with the artificial wind yanking at her hair, while she tugged and cursed at her knife, seemingly inextricable from William's ribcage.  Blinking her eyes against another updraft of swirling grit, she found herself thinking, "Damnit.  If I'm going to kill people, I'm going to get paid for it.""

Argh.  Someday, I'll figure out a way to organize my scattered thoughts. 

Maybe even in 2012.  A person can dream, right?