I have been doing a lot of writing in the past couple of weeks. I wrote some pretty decent starts and dribbles for my memoir about the Epic European (and UK) Excursion at Table Rock Writers from August 29-September 2. But I wrote it all in a notebook and was beginning to feel like I would never go back and type up those pieces.
Additionally, I have spent the past two weeks in a daily prompt group that meets at 7 a.m. I started typing those into my computer, though, so that I didn’t have to retype them. As I also did with the Sunday evening group, which I share with my new Table Rock friends Sharon and Sharon. Best of all, I did two Mining the Motherlode sessions with Darnell Arnoult last week and got true gold out of both.
All of those untitled, unfinished documents were sitting here on my laptop as of yesterday. I realized that I needed to go back in and at least save them, but I wanted to create folders for each writing group that I’m part of now. Long, stupid story short: I didn’t get around to it yesterday.
And when I turned on my computer from sleep mode this morning, it had rebooted itself, so all those documents had been converted to unsaved files. I’ve managed to find everything. Except for the Wednesday Mining the Motherlode. And I’m gutted. I am actually sitting here, in tears, for the loss of the work that I did that day. Because, frankly, I was on fire! The prompts were brilliant, and I was able to tie them into my memoir and make good art; I connected so perfectly mining those great memories. And now, it’s just all gone. I’ve tried everything I know and just cannot find that file. It was about 7 pages long of different prompts and my writing reactions to them. I can’t quit kicking myself. I can’t quit telling myself how stupid I was not to save that stuff sooner. And none of that does me any good. The words are gone. The ideas, the clever phrasing, the inspired words handed down from my muse… It’s gone. All gone. I lose everything. And now I have just lost some of the best words I have written in weeks. I think I’m just going to go cry for a while now. That’s all I feel like doing now that the words are gone…
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