A scary Halloween story: what happens when you lose a third of your book forever

Well the truly amazing thing is that remain breathing (if somewhat erratically) and still with ability to write new words and you might even learn something about your own practice and your work in progress along the way.


So how did this happen? Well, I’m the woman who swallowed a fly (or cockroach for the purpose of this paragraph).  Short story is: my computer broke, I managed to get it to work and backed up my work  including the ‘project’ folder all to Google Drive but, honestly, I was also gossiping with a friend who’d just arrived as I did so. Mistake Number One. 


 I bought a new computer, a secondhand bright pink one ala Elle Brooks that hopefully no one will wish to steal while I’m in South America. Around this time I discovered my little studio’s kitchen cupboards had cockroaches in the nooks and crannies (*shudder, shudder* - the cupboards three steps from my bed, WHERE I SLEPT, the cupboard WHERE  KEPT MY MUESLI). I told the landlady and stopped eating in the apartment but after two particularly big and brave roaches came a-roaming a little too close to me I emailed my landlady and told her I wouldn’t stay in the apartment (stay with me, I promise this is manuscript and back-up related - this is cockroaches as a plot point) I didn’t sleep that night until 8am, imagining creepy little legs (my friend’s advice that they wouldn’t crawl on me unless there food in the bed offered little comfort), at 10am the next morning my landlady came banging and hollering at the door.



Now, as most of you know, I have lived in a few rough areas, dealt with some shady characters…none so scary as a rampaging middle-aged Portuguese woman, screaming into your face when you have had two hours sleep.  She said I was lying, I asked her what reason I’d have to lie, she told me to pack my bags and I told her I wouldn’t stay another night in the studio if she paid me. I don’t like being shouted at, and even less so when I haven’t done anything wrong ,so in the forty minutes agreed I showered and packed my bags as quickly as I could (and caught a cockroach in the fridge (*shudder, shudder*)). And because I only have a small case that was packed full, and I was already backed-up…Oh God, do you see?…I threw my old broken computer in the communal bin.  Mistake Number Two.


And then yesterday, having written scenes in Word over the last few days, I thought it’d be a nice job to re-download Scrivener, import my back-up files and get my project up and running. I opened the Google Drive folder in a café by the Marques Du Pombal Sqaure at about 10pm. But hold on, it was just a skeleton of my novel …the chapter and scene headings were there…but ALL, ALL of my words were gone. I opened it up in Scrivener and the project stats said the wordcount was ZERO. Then two things happened, the first is that I genuinely thought I was going to vomit in public and the second is that I really did cry in public (a lot) as the friends, Twitter and Facebook pals sent advice and words of support and it started to dawn on me that I had no way of getting those words back, that I had essentially thrown my novel and nine months of work into a wheely bin in Graca.


  


At about midnight I found over fifty tiny RTF files buried deep in my Google Drive and tweeted ‘It’s ok! It’s here! I need a fucking drink!’ or words to that affect. But today when it came to piecing all those little files together and seeing what I’d got, what I had was a back-up I’d done in July sometime. By my calculations I lost over 17k words of my novel. A Whole Fucking Third.



So if my hinge hadn’t broken…if I hadn’t trusted a smiling stranger with a glue gun to fix it…if I hadn’t been gossiping instead of concentrating when I transferred files…if not for cockroaches…or if only my landlady had been a bit fucking nicer or I’d had a bigger bag…if only if only…


But actually I think this could be good thing for the book and for me. Here’s how:


There’s nothing like thinking you have a giant problem to make a medium sized one seem pretty tiny: After spending two sickening hours last night thinking everything was gone, 17K really, really doesn’t seem that bad.


First drafts were made for this sort of thing: Because I had my words up until July and my more recent scenes on Word  I have is still the whole outline of the story so far. To be honest, it seems to me most of those 17k weren’t that needed.


I really only lost 20% of that 17k: Because this was a first draft and so much of the first draft for me is like feeling around a darkened corridor with your fingertips…who are these people? where is story going? What am I doing with this book? When I rewrite those scenes now I’ll have torch, I’ll know some the answers, then it’s just writing it out again. So yes, I lost 20% of bits of writing that probably won’t come out the same again and 10% of typing time…but a whole 70% of the work is still in my head ready and waiting.   


If you want to write a novel then you fucking will: About an hour into thinking I’d lost everything I was tearfully telling a friend on Skype that I’d already calculated how much I’d need to write each day to catch-up and get back on schedule. When I was writing Tony Hogan and my computer was stolen in China, I wrote the whole first draft by hand and then typed it up in noisy, smoky internet cafes.  When I want to write a book I will not be fucking defeated….what’s the point of writing a novel if you don’t feel like you really need to?


Sometimes things happen for a reason: The other side of that equation is that is made me analyse how much writing of my own I’d been doing (not teaching, mentoring or paid articles) and realising I haven’t done enough. I should have been at risk of losing a full 80K words really. Sometimes you need a big shock like this to put a rocket up your arse. Consider that rocket embedded (sorry)… almost losing it all made me even more determined to write a fucking beautiful book.


This happens quite a lot with Cloud and Scrivener syncing: If you run into trouble too, this article might be good for you.


Back the fuck up. That is all.


That is all except  thank you to every person who looked up articles for me, retweeted my calls for help and all my pals who sent virtual cuddles. It all made me cry all the more but after the hysteria had subsided I was so touched.


Next…getting my arse on the seat, catching up, writing the fucking beautiful novel of course.  


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Published on October 31, 2014 13:39
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