Only forty pages into my work in progress and I already lost a chunk of it due to a computer glitch. Gone. Into the ether. Back where it came from, I suppose. But this stuff happens. It has happened on every novel I ever wrote.
It happens, but that doesn't make it any easier.
I was writing, last night, with the weight of a difficult day on my shoulders. A tragedy occurred on a tangent in my life and I had the taste of music in my mouth. I was swallowed up by a bubble of piano keys and circumstance. I will never recreate that day, that taste in my mouth, that I put into words to the best of my limited ability.
And it's gone.
I tried to rewrite the scene, but came away with cardboard figures, shuffling their feet and scratching their heads while telling a maudlin story that no one cared about.
It happens.
As a writer, I am tasked with shaking my weary head and waving my weary fist up to heaven and then...getting back to work again, thankful for the experience of writing something that made a difficult day a little easier.
As a person who regularly puts in work on very large projects (my own and other people's), let me offer you some advice: use the Internet as your backup. At the end of each day, I e-mail myself the files I've been working on. I once had a half-manuscript file that became useless and corrupted, but because I'd sent myself an earlier version weeks before, the project was salvaged.
ReplyDeleteI used to be so good about internet back-up, but my Dropbox reached capacity and now I've gotten lazy. It was truly the best back-up though! Probably worth an upgrade...
Delete