The Trash Can Is A Lousy Editor

If your ideas keep arriving from somewhere you didn’t choose, You’re Already Infected is the $9 survival guide to how they got in and how to aim them back at the bastards.

The Dystonaut is a $2 zine for hackers and fringewalkers who figure you don’t need a bunker, you need a workbench.

THE TIP. Stephen King threw the first pages of Carrie in the trash. Young guy, teaching high school, living in a trailer in Maine, working on a story about a girl with a gift and a bad prom night. He decided it was garbage and quit.

His wife Tabitha fished the pages out of the wastebasket, shook the cigarette ash off them and told him to keep going.

His whole damn career, in a wastebasket, under the ash.

Steal this part. The night you make a thing is the worst possible time to judge it. You’re tired and too close, and you can still smell the mess it came out of.

The trash can is a lousy editor, but it’s fast, and that’s why we all keep feeding it.

So make yourself a rule. Nothing gets deleted the day it’s written. It goes in a folder called Later, and you open that folder in a week, when the thing belongs to a stranger who happens to be a little bit you.

Some of it is garbage. Some of it is a girl with a gift and a bad prom night, and you damn near threw her out.

What’s in your Later folder right now? Hit reply and tell me. ~ J.D.