Writing, Again

So, last year, I participated in NaNoWriMo. While I didn’t hit the 50,000 word target (I only managed about 20,000 by the time December rolled around), I resolved to keep at it.

And I did, sort of. While I lacked the initial zeal that characterized my November, I did continue at it, picking away at it gradually. By late March, I was around the 25-26,000-word mark when I managed to do something monumentally stupid.

I had everything saved on a USB stick, which I had needed for some geeky thing or another, and I had copied its contents to my desktop computer. All well and good so far, right? Well, when I was finished with whatever it was that I had needed the USB stick for, I copied everything back to it, and then deleted the backup (followed by my usual immediate, instinctive, and admittedly neurotic emptying of the Trash).

Of course, silly me, I hadn’t noticed that the transfer hadn’t quite worked, and worse, while I had thought that there was something on my desktop, even if it was incomplete, I made the disheartening discovery that there was nothing.

Half a novel’s work, lost in a flash because I didn’t make sure that a file transfer went through properly. I felt like a grade-a moron, I assure you. Honestly, I was pretty much devastated. all that existed of that initial draft was the first 10,000 words or so, and that is in another province (“Sorry, Dave, but your early draft is in another castle!” says Toad).

So, from memory, I’ve been reconstructing the plot. While I haven’t done much in terms of the actual writing of the thing, I’ve been plotting things out, providing myself with room to flesh things out that needed to be fleshed out, and hopefully I can fix the pacing issues that were present in the initial draft.

But tonight, I actually started re-writing the first chapter, and I won’t deny that it feels great. Hopefully I won’t drop the ball on it again.

Advertisement

Some Addenda

With regards to my previous post, a couple of other things:

1. I neglected to mention that Saturday, everything else permitting, we’ll be role-playing this weekend. Yay!
2. I’ve been assembling an outline for the new draft of this book, to start fresh and all, and I think that this one will work out better, so yay!

An Up and Down Sort of Week

…and it’s only Wednesday night.

So, taking the start of the week as Sunday (since that’s what a calendar does and all), this week got off to a pretty awesome start.  We looked at a really nice place in Clayton Park, and got our application in quickly, so things are looking good on that front. All we have to do now is wait for the current tenants to be able to get out of their lease. We should hear back by Friday, hopefully. Not having to worry about where we’ll be living come July will be a huge weight off our shoulders, and the place is utterly awesome to the max.

To the Max, I say.

On the not-awesome side, I found out yesterday that I made a huge mistake a few days ago. It seems that, when restoring backed-up files to a USB key I have, the restore didn’t work 100%. While (thankfully) I didn’t lose my backups of my 2008 tax forms, I did end up losing all of the progress on my unfinished NaNo project from last year, which I had been chipping away at since then.

That’s around 20-25,000 words lost, to put it in perspective.

So, now the plan is, much like the itsy-bitsy spider, I have to start over. At least this time, I’m allowed to plan it out more thoroughly from the start, so there’s my silver lining.