Last night I experienced every writer’s worst nightmare.
Lost words. About 4,000 of them, gone up
in smoke. Well, not literally, unless you count the smoke coming out of my
ears.
In a brain-dead, careless moment, I overwrote the current
chapter file of my new novel with an older one, and before I could stop it
handily wiped out an entire week’s work that I’d sweated over, polished, reread
dozens of times, tweaked here and there, corrected factual errors, and on and
on. All gone.
I am not the type of person who cries easily – instead, I mentally
shut down and pondered my navel (not so hard, given my current weight). As I sat there, trying not to think about how
what I’d just done was possibly the end of the world, I remembered being in a
somewhat emotionally similar situation about a decade ago when my home office
located in a little one-room cabin on our property close to the main house
burned to the ground. Lost everything in it – the fire was so hot it shot up
and singed the tops of several nearby trees and melted the glass in the window
casements. Everything a writer would
have in an office literally went up in smoke. The insurance appraiser asked for
a list of the cabin’s contents and I didn’t even know where to start. Um, there
was that irreplaceable CD of new music Yngwie Malmsteen burned for me right off
his mixing console, and there was this foot-tall soapstone replica of Bastet
that melted to an unrecognizable lump, and well, there was a treasured
autographed copy of Rita Mae Brown’s Wish
You Were Here, oh and those stacks of T-shirts for Yngwie’s Fan Club, and
filing cabinets of printed manuscripts, not to mention computer, printer, fax
machine, stereo sound system, and on and on…
Because we live in a rural county out in the woods, by the
time the fire truck water tanker of the volunteer fire department finally found
our quarter-mile driveway in the trees, there was nothing they could do but wet
down the surrounding trees to keep the
fire from spreading out into the woods. I was numb for days after the Great
Beechwood Fire, as we referred to it later (Beechwood being the dirt road we
lived on). But gradually, my long-suffering husband and I reached a point where
we just stopped mourning what was gone and started looking forward. We hired a
bulldozer, scraped the burn site bare, put in a small pond, and stocked it with
native gambusia and water lilies.
Planted roses and native azaleas around the flagstone path, encouraged a wall
of bamboo, watched dragonflies skim the top of the pond, listened to the chorus
of frogs hanging out on the lily pads at night, watched critters like raccoons, ‘possums,
and even deer stop there to drink. We had indeed moved on.
So, last night when I was staring at the screen and thinking
dark thoughts like self immolation or decapitation, I remembered the lovely pond
and how the Great Fire had been a blessing in disguise. With that in mind, I
got up, stretched, made a pot of tea, did some deep breathing, and started
typing. By midnight, I’d rewritten as
much of the lost chapter as I could remember and put in markers and notes where
things needed to go that I couldn’t remember word for word. Maybe the original
version I’d ruined wasn’t as perfect as I’d supposed, and maybe my second
attempt at writing that chapter would be even better. Anything is possible….
