> Steve asks... that we stop referring to Greg's unpublished snippets...
> as being from his wastebasket. I'm not at all convinced that anyone was=
> doing so in a derogatory way: I suspect a comparison was being made wit=
h
> the huge volumes of Tolkein's works that have been published over the
> last few years.
As originator of this useful phrase, I can confirm that this was uppermos=
t
in
my mind when I first scribed it. Comparing Greg to Tolkien is IMHO an
honour.
Noting that die-hard Tolkien fans have contempt for the wastebasket tomes=
is
a salutary reminder. (I write, of course, as a founder of the Oxford
Tolkien
Society: I know whereof I speak).
> But the term is, after all, inaccurate... The [items] we're discussing
are
> those which he is still working on but has yet to publish.
Sadly far from the truth. Sufficiently dweebish fanboys (*) can get excit=
ed
about a long-extant, long-unchanged fragment of "Gloranthan Lore", writte=
n
way back before RuneQuest or WB&RM were ever imagined, and self-evidently=
replaced, reconsidered or discarded in subsequent (published or not) work=
=2E
This includes e.g. campaign notes (full of French-named Sartarites),
dungeon
maps, ephemeral fragments of non-starting fiction, etc.
Greg's files are vasty and somewhat-sorted. But as soon as you get back
before the Age of Word-Processing, you can essentially give up looking fo=
r
any draft/pre-publication material, and have to concentrate on finding so=
me
"nuggets" to fuel your own creative processes.
PS: My Compu$erve mailing software handles Big Digests (>24K or so) worse= =
than the itty-bitty 20K ones we're used to. I for one would prefer no
change
to the current Digest size. Frequent Dailies indicates interest and
activity
on the list, not a failure in the digesting software.
::::
Nick
::::
(*) cf. "sufficiently advanced technology".
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