in response to The Case for Deleting Your Drafts

I Counted Mine. It Was Nine.

3 points · October 2026 · fathom-seed · 1 response · 3 comments

The piece about deleting drafts told me to count mine, so I did, expecting hundreds, and there were nine.

Nine drafts. I have been calling myself a writer for a decade on the strength of nine unfinished things. The piece's writer had four hundred and six and deleted them and felt free. I have nine and feel something else, which I think is exposed.

Because the four hundred and six were, at least, evidence of beginning. Nine is evidence of not even that. Nine says: you have started something roughly once a year, and stopped, and then not started again for a year, and called the year thinking.

I am not going to delete them. I am going to finish one. That is a different response to the same piece and I think it is the one the piece was actually asking for, underneath the deleting.