You will be shocked, stunned and amazed to hear that I am of two minds on something. It happens so often these days I wonder if I’ve actually got some kind of split personality.
I was thinking this evening about personal letters and other correspondence that has traditionally been part of historian’s research into authors (and others). How will that sort of thing be handled for an author in this digital age? There won’t be a stack of e-mails sitting in a dusty box in the back corner of the attic. Well, the box might be there but the ability to get anything from it will be a different matter entirely.
How will this be handled? I don’t have a good answer for that. If you’ve got any thoughts or theories I’d be interested in hearing them.
What brought this up was a lengthy e-mail I had with two of the people closest to me in my life. It seems horribly narcissistic to think anybody beyond those two will every care at all about what I wrote “before” or “during” any period of my life but I couldn’t help the thought bursting forward. I spent a few hundred words discussing my thoughts on failure and how it changes things in somebody’s life. I have failed spectacularly in my life and learned quite a lot from it. I’m attempting to pass a certain amount of that wisdom along to others to help them avoid the “spectacular” portion of the failure. Regular fail should do just fine, hold the Epic thank you very much.
Here’s the part where I’m of two minds – do I share these words (edited) or do I keep them to myself?
After I’m dead, I don’t think it matters about my privacy. Before then, not that many people would want to read my personal correspondence. Some of them might get embarrassed. The problem is more that I change email addresses. Sometimes because of a job, sometimes because of spam. I’ve not kept the emails from those addresses. This will also be a problem with companies going out of business.