WIPs and Chains

It's holiday Monday here, a long weekend and looks like a gorgeous day. And it's the last week of my four week vacation from the day job. It hasn't been as productive as I'd hoped, but I have crossed a lot of things off the "to do" list, many of which were polishing and editing older manuscripts. Late last week I finally got back into writing mode only to encounter a technological tragedy. Thursday I sat down and whipped out 3800 words on my "chef" story. Friday morning when I opened the document every one of those 3800 words was GONE. Imagine my horror. Thanks to some tech support from Nara Malone, I was able to retrieve the temp file, the last saved version of the document, but unfortunately everything I'd written had turned to gibberish (including, weirdly, a few recognizable paragraphs from another manuscript, Power Struggle, which I have not even opened in weeks. I cannot explain what happened but after wasting almost an entire day trying to get it back, I finally admitted defeat and rewrote everything.

Except 3800 words the first time around ended up only about 2900 words the second time and I know they weren't as good. I cannot describe to you how much I LOATHE trying to recreate something I already wrote. It takes all the fun out of the creative process. Anyway, it's done and I've moved on and written another 4000 words on it since then and hopefully will do at least that today!