Lost Words

I did something stupid, and I knew better! Yesterday, I mysteriously lost 150 pages of my book. This was something people warned me about, and it wasn't that I never backed up my work. My basic back my work up plan was why I still have 100 pages left.

My excuses included the fact that I am a busy mom who didn't have a space to plug in an external hard drive, or email myself all my work. It's true that I write it small chunks of time. On a good day I have an hour to write, but most of this time would not be without something taking me away from my work.

Hitting save was never a problem, but I cannot understand why my document looks like I haven't hit that button for over a month. It seems to have forgotten that even when the phone rang, and the computer was safely in sight, I still hit save.

The saddest part about this whole lesson was not that I lost my work. I lost a version of myself that I cannot seem to get back while rewriting what I lost. I tell myself that is fine, and this book will be better because I spent so much time writing out my thoughts and arranging my ideas. I often bring up a blank page on the computer when I feel stuck anyway.

It wasn't as if I felt like the almost completed draft was perfect, it was just almost done. I could have examined it for holes and colored in the the bland parts. Now I'm left with all the same fragments I began with.

Will my thoughts be different this month? Could I find a better way to arrange each section? Is it actually bad that I cannot remember certain parts? Readers would probably forget them if I cannot even remember what I was trying to say.

All things considered, I still think losing a manuscript is not a good idea. I went to cook dinner tonight and forgot to turn on the stove. I feel as if I got a really bad haircut and if I could just go back to before the appointment, it would look different. I want to be calm, and willing to work on my manuscript, but I feel like it cheated on me. I feel like it went to find a secret home. I feel like it was teasing me every moment I couldn't wait to get to my computer to write it.

Goodbye old version of my book. I will probably forget a lot of you. Until the new version.