A wish, a plea

[Hacksaw]

Maybe this is the wrong place for this, but I'm kind of upset.

See, I use Emacs to write (duh!), and I do a lot of it. If I get an 
idea, I write it down quickly, so I can develop it at my leisure.

Mostly I write fiction.

This is important becuase if I'm writing C or Python, I think about the 
file name first.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm thinking about the story.

So I started writing, and I wrote for quite a while, it was really 
flowing well, and I thought, hey, I should save, because I don't want to 
lose this, but in my reverie, I hit the ^X^C first.

And I was writing in the scratch buffer.

I bet if we took a poll, the number of emacs users who actually use the 
scratch buffer for it's intended usage is very, very low. Most either 
find a file, or open a new one.

But I wasn't in programming mode, so I was in scratch, and lost 
everything I was writing, because scratch isn't backed up by anything.

I'd be happy with a lisp snippet that made it so that scratch never 
showed up again. I can make a lisp-interactive mode file if I want it. 
In fact, when I do anything with lisp, I make a test file, and turn it 
to lisp interactive.

But my real wish is that *scratch* would just go away. IMHO, it's 
usefulness is limited. And the chances that something important gets 
lost because of a careless keystroke is too high.

Please help a poor writer?