All true.

I recently took a peek at a novel I started writing 20 years ago. I wondered if there was a way to salvage it. It was close to my heart for years. When I looked at it I was pleasantly surprised at some of the passages but also pretty sure that it was, indeed, not salvageable.

And that's okay. It has in its own way helped inform my recent novels, if only through the practice of the craft.

I've only recently made a concerted effort to get my fiction out into the world. For years I was content writing to an audience of one while I found other ways to make money.

But all was not lost during those years of not writing to an audience because I published several computer books through Wiley and others, where I was heavily edited. That, also, informed my fiction writing later on.

It's all one big long process filled, in my case, with plenty of garbage, but, as you remind us, it's all good in its own way.