Started telling my buddy Mike about this at his shop and he got this look on his face. He repairs old cookbooks and had a batch of church cookbooks he fixed up back in 2015 with some off brand PVA from a hardware store. Around year eight, the spines just crumbled when people opened them, pages fell out like dry leaves. He pulled one apart and the glue had turned this weird brownish color, smelled sour too. He still has a box of those ruined books in his garage, calls it his glue graveyard. So yeah, Jim might be picky, but Mike's got the scars to prove it.

Three hours on one prompt is already sunk cost, so the real question is whether that file earns its space on your drive. Keep it, but not as a portfolio piece, strip it down to the skeleton of what went wrong and label it "twist check" or "pacing fail." I did that with a horror prompt last year where the reveal landed flat, and six months later I reused the same setup with a different payoff and it placed in a small contest. A failed prompt is like a cracked hammer, you don't display it, but you remember how it broke so you don't swing that way again. Dana's right if you're just hoarding it for nostalgia, but wrong if you're mining it for your next try.