Denial

Until yesterday I was in denial about how much writing I lost when my one-year-old macbook's hard drive crashed. I'd been taking a lot of notes by hand and I thought they would be sufficient to recreate what I had finished. Yesterday I put my mending elbow to the test and typed for an hour. Then it hit me. I lost fifty pages of my WIP as well as all the research I had carefully bookmarked and excerpted. And some of the scenes I wrote were not in my notebook at all. So now I'm back to square one. I'm trying to get the first 35 pages back in shape to enter the Emily contest. We all have setbacks. I'm trying not to let the extreme irony of this one get me down. Bike crash and hard drive crash in the space of two days. My muse is testing me. The exasperating hussy.

Lessons learned:

Back up! Lapse not into complacency, lest ye lose everything.

Accept not that third glass of wine from the cute tattooed bartender before singing more Liza Minnelli, lest ye be unfit to ride home.

Are you entering the Emily? Are you signing up for the Golden Heart? Are you asking yourself whether you can possibly finish your WIP by December 3rd? I know I am.

Waah!

On Thursday night I flew off my bicycle and fractured my left elbow (I'm typing with my right hand only--fun).

On Friday my laptop completely died.

Sometimes you have to laugh, or else you're going to cry. I thought about posting lurid closeups of my battered knees, but I didn't want to make you sick.

The writing continues by hand. Maybe this is actually a good thing. My thoughts flow well on to paper. I hope I didn't lose my hard drive, though, because I hadn't backed up since I finished chapter one.

Ever broken a bone at an inopportune time?