Late last week, I took a pause in my current work-in-progress to look for a piece of writing that fit in with the work, and which I was sure I had scribbled down at some point in the past.

I have two Scrivener projects I use for notes. One is called Thoughts, and the other is Writing Projects. Thoughts really is for random jottings, notes and ideas. Writing Projects was originally conceived as a placeholder for new story ideas. Some things still get in there but not quite in the way I envisioned initially. I find it easier now to set up a complete Scrivener project and drop all the thoughts in there as they occur to me.

As you’re probably gathering, I didn’t find what I was looking for in those Scrivener projects. Where else to look?

Quite often I’ll take a scene or situation from a larger story idea and write a sort story covering that incident. I didn’t think I’d done that in this case, but worth a look inside the Scrivener project that stores all my short stories.

I still didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find a completed three-thousand word short story that, according to the timestamp, I wrote about four years ago. The characters have appeared in other stories so they were familiar. The story itself not so much. I looked through my submissions log, and found I had never submitted the story to an editor, which made sense as I couldn’t find a proper manuscript document anywhere.

The piece of writing I was looking for remains elusive, but it was a nice surprise to discover something from the past – something I wrote and forgot about.

I’m wondering how many other stories I have that are like that.