day 6: calamity

Tonight, thanks to a hiccup in the internet universe, I lost my whole day's work--only about 800 words, but a pivotal scene. I grappled briefly with shall I try to rewrite this scene while it's as fresh as it's ever going to be? or just go on to the next one and come back to this one later, when I'm not trying so hard to chase the words that. Are. Just. Gone?

(Ugh. Because they really are gone. When you're writing this fast, the good thing is that the words can get flowing pretty well. The bad thing is that you don't really remember what you wrote until you review it.)

Suffice it to say, my love affair with Google Docs from day 1 is over. And I am reminding myself about the utility of the lowly flash drive. Stupid rookie lessons, ignored in my optimistic hubris that this project is just going to go smoothly, dammit.

Okay, it's not a calamity--it wasn't the whole 10K--but it does have me thinking about how ephemeral the act of "making" truly is. Lots of writers have their "lost manuscript" story--Garrison Keillor and leaving the finished manuscript on the train comes to mind (perhaps apocryphally). I am still convinced that the lost pages of my master's thesis (disappeared during another freak computer snafu, come to think of it) are the best work I would write on that project, and perhaps ever.

But I know better now, right? These are just words, and there are plenty more where they come from. The only works of art I've ever made with true staying power in a tangible sense are sleeping in their beds down the hall right now. And they will wake up tomorrow and tell me a joke or insist on my addressing them as "Baby Rabbit," and the world has gone on spinning just fine, lost 800 words and all. It's quite possible I will write a better 800 words of that pivotal scene now that I have the first dross-y version out of my system.

But from now on, I am backing up like a rabid mofo.