Onwards

It will have been a week by the time this post goes up since the WORST THING EVER.

I accidentally deleted 2,000 words of Lifebringer. Not just any words, good words. Hands down the best prose of Lifebringer so far. The sort that would be the benchmark when it came time to edit. I don't say this to toot my own horn, I was seriously proud of the quality of what I'd written.

And then I lost it.

I don't know how it happened. I was reaching for 'CTRL+I' to turn on italics, then I heard a sound reminiscent of the 'would you like to save' pop up, and all at once the document was closed. I was in shock.

So I looked up where Word keeps it autosave files. Thank goodness for those. I had to dick around with my folder settings just to find where they were kept, but in the end I found them.

And Lifebringer wasn't there.

In fact, the most recent document was from 2013.

2,000 words were gone.

I guess it serves me right for not saving, but something about it didn't seem right. I went and took a look at how Word is meant to autosave documents, and found something very interesting. There's meant to be an option you can check that makes Word keep the last autosave of a document even if you select 'don't save' when you close the program. In my settings for Microsoft Word, no such option exists. Where the checkbox should be is nothing.

In short, fuck Dell and their pre-installed garbage OS.


So the next day I re-wrote the section. The prose isn't as good, but I can still write good prose, and when it comes time to edit I can bring that whole section (and indeed the whole book) up to the standard I'm after. I still hit the same story beats, and the section moves the plot just as it's supposed to. In fact, I even improved one section that wasn't working before (as much as the prose doesn't drip like honey anymore).

This week has hurt like hell, and I'm amazed at how hard I've found it to deal with what happened. It really affected me, and I was shocked by how affecting it was. Still, I persevered in what I like to think was the best way I could. I couldn't just sit idle and wallow, letting the sore fester until I never touched Lifebringer again. I carried on. I muscled through it, and did something as hard as anything I've done so far on my journey as a writer.

Onwards and upwards, or at least that's what I tell myself.