It took me a few minutes to work out why, because I couldn't fathom putting forth anything by my best.
It occurred to me then that having the full scope of an author's work is always interesting: Jane Austen's Lady Susan came out after her death, as did Robert Heinlein's For Us, The Living. The only difference, then, is that Alicorn is not entrusting her early creations to crumbling paper, but keeping them on the internet with her other works. She's not keeping drafts and things she feels she's grown out of just for family and friends. It makes sense, as nothing else she's had up was restricted in that way: her distribution is entirely online, from what I know.
And it gives us a chance as readers to note how much she's grown as a writer without having to wait for her to die and dig through her things, which is always a plus.
I have a similar, if more private, archive in my Google Documents. I think it's probably a sign of the generation I come from that I consider it more indestructible on a collection of servers than in hard copy.
I keep all my stuff on the hard drive, a dedicated thumb drive, and final copies on Google Docs. My hard drive died suddenly on me a few months ago and I lost everything on it - thankfully I had backups and it barely slowed me down!
ReplyDeleteI keep backups on my hard drive, but keep the primaries on my Google Docs because I had a similar hard drive failure before I had the backups. Lost more than I'd have liked.
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