Yesterday I played the new Halo 2 XBox game for twelve hours straight. Just now I woke up and was still dreaming about playing. Even after I woke up, I kept my eyes closed for a long time, and still saw the game behind my eyelids.
I wrote almost nothing yesterday.
And the day before… I’m almost too angry to write about it, but I lost about a thousand words of my novel. I was copying and pasting a section from one file to another. I cut over a hundred lines of text from one file, and then saved and quit, opened the new file to paste into… and it only pasted fifty lines. Exactly fifty. I had just done a word count. I had been AHEAD. Remember my last entry, where I said I’d have to write 2000 more words? I had done that. I had written about a thousand words an hour for two hours.
I did another word count, and I was down about a thousand words. I checked my scroll buffers, I tried to undo, nothing. I had nothing. I sat there and thought about throwing my laptop across the room. I was so angry I almost cried. And it was nobody’s fault but my own. I wanted to give up. I wanted nothing to do with nanowrimo anymore.
I still keep all my old journals. I know half the stuff in them is crap, but I keep it all. I have to. I’m just like that. I have nightmares about losing them in a fire or something. This was like that. This was devastating.
I tried to tell myself that what I’d written was crap anyway, I tried to tell myself I’d write it better the next time around. I tried to tell myself that it was only an hour of work I’d have to re-do. I tried to tell myself that it could have been much worse. I could have erased my whole novel, or worse my whole hard drive could have crashed or something. But none of these thoughts consoled me.
I will be more careful in the future.
Oh god, I feel your pain. That’s just awful. Brings to mind something so painful that I rarely think about it. Back when I was six or seven months pregnant with the little man (when I was still all glowy and looking quite good, just before the swelling started) I spent a weekend using my old digital camera…taking photos of friends, and having photos taken of me with friends, many of whom no longer live here. Before I was about to hook the camera up to my computer I thought I’d save some disk space and delete the few bad shots. With one little push of the button in preview mode I managed to delete them ALL. Sixty photos gone, just like that. And I did cry.
Argh….I know that has got to suck major donkey balls. I remember when I was trying to write a book (long time ago) I lost the whole first chapter. I knew it wasn’t done very well, but I felt it was worse trying to rewrite it. I hope you fair much better at your task…