Sometime between Saturday and this morning, I lost a nine-hundred and seventeen word scene for a Red Robin project.*
This is exactly why you don’t ever congratulate yourself about bringing something in well under deadline because your butt is as good as bit the moment that thought is thinked, or worse yet, vocalized.
I’ve got my notes, the sketchy outline I spent most of Friday evening and Saturday morning filling out . . . but no scene.
Gaaaaah.
Before each of you wonderful, supportive people send me comments and commiserations about the importance of backing up Each and Every Time, I swear to you, loudly and thoroughly, that I did—I can be taught and I learned my lesson after the Laundered Flash Drive Incident almost exactly a year ago.
But before I backed up my document, I must have confused drafts and pasted the contents of the older draft into the newer document. So I have two backups of the sketchy outline. . .
Feel free to comment about that, I deserve it.
The right stuff is gone. Nine-hundred words. Just like that.
I spent the whole morning trying to reconstruct the scene** and while the results aren’t bad, they aren’t as good as I remember.
They never are.
Then again, I have a few days left. I can rebuild it . . . I have the imagination. I can make it better, stronger, faster . . .
Sigh . . .
Anyone want to share any similar moments of Gaaaaah? I’d love to know I’m in the middle of the Boneheaded Moves Bell Curve instead of way out here at the end . . . .
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*Five people (this time around—more than seven and we tend to lose the thread of the thing) playing “Can you?” with a premise. We each add a scene or chapter to the story in rotation, being very careful to end each of our contributions in a way guaranteed to make the next person in line pull out their hair and send e-mails like, “Really? A tadpole? Really?!”
**After running around looking at every file that might possibly be it (no) and then doing it again in case I missed something (no) and a third time just in case (no) and then seeing if I’d e-mailed it to anyone without remembering I’d do so (no) or if I’d saved any scraps of it in the places where I save scraps (no) and then calling myself every name in the book and reeling from the sudden, depressive weight of having to recreate what suddenly felt like the Best Thing I Have Ever Written.
Earful of Cider 