No more ripped out pages.

"It's just the most practical thing to do," I tell myself, as I click "New Blog" and start messing around with settings, with fonts, with backgrounds, creating this online space I've named Repository 327.

"It's just a place to store stuff," I reason with myself, as I debate between orange and teal, and search through stock photos for a suitably dull library shot.

"No big deal," I say to myself...

Except for me? It kind of is. Keeping my writing is kind of a big deal.

I am a serial writer. A serial blog-starter. And a serial destroyer of the things that I write.

I own tons of paper journals. I love paper journals; I love the way they feel in my hands, I love they way they look, I love the sight of a gel pen gliding over the paper's surface, dancing over and under the baseline. So, every once in a while I'll crack one open and write a few pages. Then I'll stick it back on the shelf, and find it again a few months later, at which point I have this internal dialogue:

"You loser - you did it again! You started a journal and didn't stick with it. Might as well rip these pages out."

Over the summer, I was getting ready to move and I was going through old journals as I was packing them up. Some had a few pages still intact, but most had raggedy edges where I had ripped pages out. I began to wonder: how many words have I thrown away? How much of my time, how much of myself have I simply tossed into a trash can? Not to mention bits and bytes - I kept a personal blog consistently for years, and shortly after my divorce, in a fit of pique and "I'm not that person anymore," I deleted it. I have often regretted that choice.

And I regret all the thrown out pages, too. Because yeah, maybe I'm not that person anymore. Heck, I hope I'm not. But just tossing aside those thoughts and the time I spent? What a waste.

I vowed to myself then: no more thrown-out pages. That doesn't mean if something's crappy I'm not going to rewrite it if necessary, or that I'm going to save every scrap in a shoebox (or a digital shoebox) like some Hoarders version of Emily Dickinson. But I am going to stop editing myself so harshly that I decide the things I write deserve destruction.

Thus, this Repository. Probably my 327th attempt at a blog... but hey, that's kind of my lucky number, after all. It's a central place to keep all my writery stuffs... however sparse they may be.