I Wrote About The Afterlife, But I Never Really Lived More Than An Hour,

Firstly, let me say that that statement is categorically untrue, but I have become more than a little obsessed with Fall Out Boy over the last couple of weeks (I've somehow been worse since the gig, which doesn't normally happen) so there are a few lyrics that I have been singing a lot, and the original version of that has definitely been in the mix a few times (it's from Saturday, for anyone even slightly less obsessed than I am) and I thought it would make a good blog title. Or a tattoo, but since I don't have any tattoos and equally don't have any plans to change that, the blog title will have to do. 

With everything that has been going on I've been thinking a lot about writing. I guess that with everything going on with NaNo it's had me reflecting on how much of an impact it really had on me, given that until the first year of NaNo I had never actually written a full novel. And actually, it took me until 8 months after the finish of my first NaNo to achieve that feat, but it's been an incredible learning curve all the same. It's not always been easy. There have been plenty of times where NaNo has made me feel pretty ill. NaNoFlu kicked my ass more than freshers flu did, partly because I've had it far more often. And then there was what happened seven years ago.

Seven years ago I was writing something that I loved, that I was proud of, something that I finished on Day 9 and then tragedy struck. I am pretty sure that it was my first 20k day (I checked, it was), the year we went to Brighton, and it was then the year that my computer ate my novel, and honestly, I never forgave it. I know it was my fault for not backing the damn thing up, but it was a busy just over a week, and I thought my computer had it. I didn't click save when I shut the laptop, the battery died and cleared the temp files and when I turned it back on the file was corrupted, the novel was gone and there was nothing that any of my IT inclined friends could do to bring it back, and I was heart broken. I still have the files on my computer, but I don't know why. One of those people had run it through every recovery program that they could think of, and it was well and truly gone.

Since that happened, I haven't really been able to put the same effort into a novel that I did into that one. It felt like a little bit of my love for writing died that day, and honestly, it has taken until now or recently at least, for me to think about writing the same way again, because I want to write a sequel to Fairies and I want to love it as much as I love that book. I don't know if that is going to happen, but I would like it to. 

It's not just the writing, is the thing. What I remember about Fairies is that I spent a long time editing that book, and went over it and over it and over it, and then after I self-published it, needed to pull it and then do another edit on it, because something had gone wrong even after I went over it, edited it and had beta readers go over it, too. I think that, subconsciously, I knew that throwing that much energy into writing something and then editing it, and potentially losing it even if through my own idiocy, was far more than I could cope with at the time. I mean, one of the reasons I never considered applying or querying to the 'traditional' publishing route was because I was terrified of being rejected from it, and I know that it's highly likely to happen, because pretty much everyone gets rejected (at least once or twice, but more often a lot more times than that). 

Anyway, the fact that I have been thinking about writing in this way is really positive, or at least I think it is, and maybe it means that one of the novels I have been drafting for the last few years (including a redraft of the one that got deleted or corrupted or however you want to say it) is actually going to see the light of day at some point. Maybe.