Plastic Somethings

While cleaning today, I found an odd-shaped Plastic Something sitting on top of the freezer. It's no bigger than my thumbnail with little grooves and slots where it obviously is supposed to fit into or onto Something Else. Looks important, as if Something Else wouldn't work correctly without this strange missing piece. What that might be, I have no idea.

So I asked Michael if he could help me identify this Plastic Something. He didn't recognize the piece either. We now had a choice -

- toss it and find out in hours (or days or weeks) that the Plastic Something was indeed a vital part of Something Else and now the entire thing won't work and aaarrrggghhh! or...

- keep it just in case we figure out where it came from.

We placed it beside the other odd-shaped Somethings on a corner of his desk. Just in case. As time goes by, we'll realize that whatever it came from obviously works fine without it. Then we can pitch it in good conscience. But for now, it gathers dust with its soul mates on his desk.

The other day I found Word files on my desktop I'd written some time ago and forgotten about. Some were first drafts of short stories which I never polished. There were shorter bits too, snippets of character profiles, unusual settings, and story lines jotted down in 30 or more different Word files.
Don't get me wrong. Some are probably trash.
But others have potential. I've just never taken the time to develop them, or more to the point, to figure out where they might fit in some larger work.

Those pieces of manuscript are like that Plastic Something -  I keep them, just in case I figure out where they belong. After all, Something Else might not work properly without them.