I’ve been working on my current manuscript, but it’s been slow going. Lately, it’s been tough to find my groove. External factors haven’t helped, but I’ve been plugging along. I love the characters, the scenario, and especially the last scene I wrote a few days ago. It was full of witty banter and some important clues.
And then, in the middle of the night, Microsoft decided to perform an update.
The next day, I opened my file and—poof—over a thousand words were gone. The entire last scene just vanished. At first, I refused to believe it. I was convinced I’d opened the wrong file. I wanted to believe I’d opened the wrong file. But no, it was the right one.
Cue the spiraling (as if I weren’t already spiraling), and the frantic search for any hope that a file with the missing words still existed. I spent hours (over a period of days) trying to recover the missing text—digging through temporary files, hidden files, iCloud, OneDrive, my desktop. Nothing. For a brief, shining moment, I thought I’d found a hidden file that might be my savior. I used Word’s recovery option, held my breath… and got an error message.
This went on for three days. Three days of being completely derailed from my story. My muse, sensing danger, promptly skipped town. I know some people might say, “Eh, a thousand words isn’t that much.” It’s about four typed pages. But when you’re already struggling? When you can’t control any of the bigger things that are out of control, then losing any words, even a thousand, is too much.
Feeling stalled out (whether you’re a writer or not) is pretty common, and it’s a phenomenon I’ve seen happen to many of my author friends lately. Which means, it’s easy to let setbacks, big or small, knock you off course. But, now, since I’ve officially accepted that my words are lost forever, all I can do is move forward. Tonight, I put on my big girl panties and rewrote the scene. Is it as good as the lost words? Yeah, probably. Maybe? Even so, every single word still hurt. Ugh.
Lesson learned (once again…this isn’t the first time I’ve lost words). What can I do? Move forward, of course. It’s better than being in a perpetual state of word paralysis over something that I have no control over. So, I’m letting this one go so I can keep writing (one word after another) until I get to “The End.” But…from now on, I’m saving to a USB drive and the desktop and iCloud and OneDrive. Because, apparently, redundancy is the only way to fight the update monster.
Have you ever had something like this knock you for a loop? How did you get back up?
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