Why I Publish Every Draft

The short answer is that I want to. The long answer is...

Trans Resource
I want my full body of work to be available to other trans artists and anyone studying trans art. I stand against the historic and current systematic erasure of trans existences (let alone our art); to be visible for my community is a responsibility that weighs more than my life in the face of its associated risks.

Compulsion
I am compelled to preserve and archive things. The compulsion is a trauma response, and all of this is a very complicated form of healing.

Educational Use-cases

1. Demystify the drafting process for new writers and readers
2. Show what an author's full body of work looks like 'behind the curtain'
3. Provide necessary data for:
   1. the study of writing as a long-term technical process
   2. interdraft literary analysis
   3. understanding the relationship between an author and their work

Reflection
I love seeing my growth over time. I love seeing where my stories start and end, I love seeing what changes, I love theorizing about why my younger self made certain choices in the story, and I love having direct access to a self I can never be again.

Personal Conviction
I believe the lack of publicly available pre-final drafts is detrimental to the writing community as a whole, but especially in terms of:

1. the perceived value of literature (societally; intracommunally; commercially)
2. the development of confidence in new writers
3. the development of writing skill in all writers
4. substantial literary discourse, peer review, workshopping, and critique
5. comparisons between pieces, authors, and genres
   1. (ugh.)
6. the oft-neglected meta-narrative of the author's development alongside the development of their work
   1. an artist's paintings at 6 and 60 years tells a story about their life; our drafts are the same way

I believe that art is necessarily devalued by erasure of its process. I believe omission is erasure--- the history left untold by the victors.

Necessity
I am a human in the age of 'content' where art is mass-produced autonomously as product and commodity. I hope the perceived authenticity of my own work never comes into question. I hope if it does, my archive will protect me.

I don't know if I could survive the theft of my work being used as yet-another basis for why I do not qualify as human.

Is this really everything you've written?

No, but it is as close as I can reasonably get. If you're interested in the process, these are the kinds of things I consider before archiving something publicly:

Opportunity cost
It takes time to transfer my writing to my website, and it takes a little more time to test my website afterwards. Until I can significantly reduce the friction of this process, my collection will be necessarily incomplete.

Lost media
90-95% of my early writing is completely and irreversibly lost to time despite my best efforts to preserve it. I also didn't start preserving the early drafts for my projects until 2025, so I lost most of those as well :(

Collaborative projects
I have written for many, many collaborative projects. Regardless of how large or small my contributions are, I just don't feel comfortable posting these projects on my personal website as an example of my work.

Indecent writing
I write things that are unkind, unwise, or unsavory. I do not consider them worth reading, and I do not share them.

Not my intellectual property
I love playing TTRPGs and often expand them for fun. However, as the IP is not mine, I do not share this work.

I also love learning and researching things and often end up writing down my findings. While I would love to share all that I have learned, many of these essays (especially the old ones) have incomplete and missing citations. As this work is literally not mine, I will not share it or distribute it as my own.

Medium mismatch
Rarely, I make something that I just can't figure out how to format, upload, or maintain. This is mainly for some text-based adventure games I've made. Alas!

Incomprehensible writing
I do not share things that cannot be understood when separated from their original context.

Deeply vulnerable writing
Certain pieces are just too painful to share publicly.