It started, as most epic tales do, with good intentions and a slightly overstuffed tote.
I told myself I’d just do a quick organizing pass—nothing major. Just sort a few things, maybe prep a tote or two for moving. What I didn’t anticipate was stumbling into a time capsule. A spindle of discs. Then another. Then another. Nearly two hundred of them, stacked like ancient scrolls from the early digital age.
And oh, the things I found.
There were backup copies of Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003, preserved like sacred relics from an era when software came in boxes and installing it felt like a ceremony. There were photos, writing journals, music libraries, and half-forgotten projects with file names like “FINALfinalDraft_3_REALLYfinal.doc.” You know the ones.
But then I found the disc.
Sharpie-labeled. Dated. “Published – 03/16/2003.”
And I paused.
At first I chuckled—because wow, past me really believed. But then I stopped laughing. Because inside that disc were the first stirrings of what would eventually become my second novel. Notes. Plans. Foundation. Direction for an entire series I hadn’t even realized I was planting at the time.
I had called it “Published.”
Not out of arrogance.
But out of faith.
Faith that someday, somehow, this thing I was writing would grow. That it would matter.
And it did.
So I kept sorting. With music in the background, a shredder beside me, and a sense of slow realization forming like a warm glow behind my ribs: I didn’t know I was archiving my legacy. But I was.
There were journals from 1998. Soapmaking notes from 2001. Digital whispers from versions of myself who dreamed in paragraphs and made plans with nothing more than curiosity, conviction, and a CD-R.
Not everything gets kept. Some things are meant to be let go of.
But others—some precious, dusty, long-forgotten others—remind you that you’ve been walking this path a long time. Even when it didn’t feel like it. Even when you didn’t know where it was leading.
So no, I didn’t finish going through all two hundred discs.
But I found enough to know this:
The spark has always been there.
And every so often, you get to see it through your own handwriting.
Dated. Labeled. And finally… fulfilled.
xo Ametra
