Of Masks and Dolls

It may be too late for a serious reflection on this, but here it goes anyway.

I bring it up now, mid-June only because I've had it in me to start cleaning up files on my desktop. There are a great many digital files that I do not need, many I don't even know what they are, and some I haven't opened up and seen since the day I got them. The real trouble with digital files is that they are much more easily out of sight out of mind. With paper, well, if it's in you hand, you have to deal with it.
So, I did Camp NaNoWriMo in April. I did a complete rewrite of a “novel” I wrote in the fall of 2000. The old version was call Mascaras Y Muñecas, and as I reread it, it was one messy thing. It was messy because that was who I was at the time I wrote it.
Just to be sure, I spent 13 months, starting in April of 2023 (also a Camp NaNoWriMo thing) reworking old novels. These old novels were written in 1993, 1999, 2000 and 2001 respectively. And the Mascaras Y Muñecas was the last one of the four. The title changed to Of Masks and Dolls and that is important only because this novel was a continuation of In Tint or Texture which I wrote a couple of years back.

The rewrite had nothing much to do with the plot or characters from the original.

And admittedly, the whole thing was very cathartic to write. All four of these were. And the beautiful thing about NaNoWriMo, at least for me, it gives my schedule some structure and a sense of urgency. It took all 30 days of April to complete it. At the end, I got a certificate.