Prescient at the time, outdated now
I've been tidying up my work in progress folder over the last few days, part genuine attempt to feel less overwhelmed when I switch on the computer and see such a massive list of incomplete work, part procrastination technique at a time of wavering focus. For whatever reason, they're mostly speculative fiction of some flavour or another. Probably because with SFF I'm striving for perfection and never finding it, comparing every story to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett or PKD and feeling dissatisfied, endlessly seeking the optimum ending.
Some stories I have no recollection of writing, and I read the pages I have got (3,000 words, in some cases!) with great enjoyment, getting caught up in the plot, feeling for the characters, and then... What? What happens next? I need to know! But if I knew, I'd have written it down 8 years ago. Those ones stay, somewhat optimistically, in the work in progress area, a promise to myself that one day, one day I will know and I will write it down.
Others are from writing exercises and aren't going anywhere. They maybe have some good descriptions but I'm just riffing on a half-baked idea and there's nothing much to salvage. They go in the folder labelled Abandoned so I can strip them down for parts later. I rarely do, but there's always the possibility that gold is buried in those paragraphs of dross.
The ones that I'm finding the most interesting and frustrating are the ones that would have looked like I had insight, if I'd actually finished them. Like the one where I had Boris Johnson as PM (I wrote a note on that one in June 2016: "with Boris looking likely to replace the recently-resigned Cameron this no longer seems as amusing as it did a few months ago" - of course, it was actually 3 years later that he finally got there), or Hillary Clinton pointing out (in 2008) that if she'd been elected as president this situation would have been handled so much better. There's the one I wrote when civil partnerships were a new thing, featuring the first gay cabinet minister to get married (in a church!) while in office, the incredibly futuristic one where everyone wears wristbands that they wave at the barriers to pay credits for their city journey - I've seen my friend do that with her Apple watch on the underground when I visited her in London 2 years ago! There are numerous instances of people using things that are suspiciously like ipads (usually called entscreens) as well as scientific and technological developments where capabilities and attitudes have come a long way in 15 years.
I'm not sure what to take away from this rummage through my old writing. If you haven't touched a story in 17 years you can probably delete it? Some developments are inevitable? Or maybe I've learnt that if I can just figure out how to find the optimum ending for those lingering stories, I could be a pretty decent SFF writer.