The Deletion Dilemma

My computer is old.

Not OLD old. She’s not working with floppy disks, we’re not distracting ourselves with games of Oregon Trail.

But she is the MacBook Pro I bought in 2014 with my first book income. She’s been fantastic—reliable, problem-free, endlessly useful.

But the world is moving on. There are new and updated programs I might not be able to put on her because she doesn’t have the memory for them (very relatable).

I can’t get a new computer just yet, but as a nod toward pretending to acknowledge the problem I just deleted a ton of old files to clear the old girl’s mind a little.

Screenshots.

Word files that were just single chapters of drafts I have compiled (and better yet, updated) elsewhere.

Photos.

More screenshots.

Outdated promo images.

It’s weirdly hard to declutter all of this stuff that I haven’t used in years. Not just digitally, either—I have a plastic bin under my bed that’s stuffed full of the notebooks I planned my first books in.

On some deep, survival-oriented level my brain seems to think I need to have proof that my books are mine from every stage, concept to publication.

But why?

Am I scared that someone is going to come at me like a creationist demanding that every gap in the evolutionary timeline be filled in before they’ll believe I wrote Bound or Vines and Vices? That if I’m missing “pre-beta version 3” of chapter six that this missing link will be my downfall in spite of the fact that I alone did, in fact, write my books?

I might have thought at one time that it was good to keep these things in case I decided to go back to an earlier draft, but after publication it’s all just flotsam and jetsam and clutter that burdens my poor old computer.

So hooray for me. I deleted a lot of crap.

Yes, I should have been editing at the time, and yes, I’m still keeping those old notebooks.

But it’s a thing I did. Somewhere north of a hundred files, all gone.

If you’ll excuse me, I am now going to stare at a wall now while I wait for the draft police to arrive.