On Monday, April 5, 1976, the Central New Jersey Home News published an article about a one-day comic con (or “Shabang” as they called it) which had been held the day before, just a few days after my 21st birthday. I remember that day, but it’s been a long while since I thought of it, or of who I was back then.

When I came across the article yesterday, and read what the reporter wrote I’d said, several things came to mind.

First, about the fact I’d stopped counting how many comic books I owned once I hit 4,000 of them—

Well, I did count how many comics I owned once I was no longer able to look at them without feeling bitter thanks to my experiences in the industry, and decided to sell almost all of them. I now own no more than a couple of hundred at most, and that includes the ones I wrote, but at the time I disposed of the majority of my collection, I owned more than 7,000.

The attendance at the con of Michael Avallone reminds me—there was a time I wanted to be Michael Avallone, about whom Wikipedia states: “His lifetime output was over 223 works (although he boasted over 1,000), published under his own name and 17 pseudonyms.”

I was once envious of that kind of output, and at some point early on wanted to be the kind of commercial writer who’d end up with an output of hundreds of novels. I’m not sure exactly when I changed, but now, having published one novel, and that a short story which ran away from me, the thought of deliberately attempting a novel seems bizarre to me. Short stories are what I love, and unless another one runs away from me someday and insists on growing through the revision process, it’s unlikely there’ll ever be another Edelman novel for you to read.

And speaking of novels, what made me smile the most was the way the writer of the article described me as “currently working on a novel for children.”

I did finish that novel.

And then I destroyed it.

Along with a couple of other novels and at least 25 short stories written in my teens and early 20s, an erasure I’ve told you about.

The novel about which I was telling the reporter was terrible—flawed in concept and embarrassing in execution. I’m extremely lucky it was rejected by every children’s book publisher which saw the manuscript back when I would have been 22, perhaps 23 at the oldest. I’d tell you the bare outline of the plot, but even that’s too wince-inducing to reveal.

I’m grateful it no longer exists as evidence of how foolish I was.

And hope that when I someday look back on my recent writing, almost all of it out in the world and unable to be recalled and destroyed as my earlier unpublished work was, I won’t consider those works to be evidence of how foolish I am now.