I didn't think I was going to write this, but now I realize I need to.
I'm not going to be so arrogant as to say I need to write it for anyone who may need to read it - if I can be the cautionary wail, great, but that is not the purpose of this. The purpose of this is what most of my writing is; it is my catharsis.
Before NaNoWriMo started this year, I was excited. I'm a bit of a geek, so I always am, and I mean geek in the traditional sense of the word - not the it's emblazoned on the front of a sweat shop produced t-shirt and mass sold as fashion to people who would have used it as an insult kind of sense.
I had it in my head that I wanted to smash what I consider to be my record, my PB if you will (or if you won't, it's my blog) of 19 days. 19 days hurt. I got ill after those 19 days, but it was an adrenaline rush that most people wouldn't associate with writing a novel; I'm glad I get to be one of the people that knows better.
Anyway, tenacious is definitely an adjective people would use about me, and tenacious I was. I scrapped a whole 11 days off of my PB and "won" on the evening of day 9 in the café of Foyles book store. It was beautiful. It was perfect. I enjoyed it immensely.
Now, this was not an easy feat. I am still an ML so I was attending a huge string of events, I hadn't taken leave from work, so was still working my normal day job, though not my usual hours as my managers are incredible and let me have some flexibility, but I fit writing 50000 words into 9 days of my life. I felt like the steamiest pile of animal droppings you can imagine - I was wrung out, but God, I was happy. I kept having these little panics where I woke up in the middle of the night and thought "I need to back this novel up" then would decide to do it in the morning as bed was warm and comfortable and laptop was in living room and that far. Yes, words dropped out of my thought process so you can almost tell how tired I was. Each time I had picked up or touched the laptop in that 9 days the goal was simple and attainable only with remarkable focus. Unfortunately that meant that I was so engrossed in writing and remembering to save that I forgot to save a back up...
This is the point where I wish this were a horror story I was writing. I wish I could skip back a couple of chapters and scrawl THE MC THREW BACK HER BED CLOTHES, CLAMBERED DISCOORDINATELY OUT OF THE BED AND SAVED BACK UPS OF THAT FILE ON EVERY USB DEVICE SHE OWNED but she didn't. I didn't.
In the afternoon/evening of the eleventh day of NaNo, I closed the laptop lid, put it into my bag and thought nothing of it. I went home and I didn't plug it in. It lost power over the weekend and when II came to loading it up on the Tuesday night for a writing session, it was already gone, and so were any hopes of retrieving it.
Now, I have a magnificient army of friends who rallied like I have never seen anyone rally to try and revive this file. They weren't going to let it go down without a fight, but it was too late. It kind of felt like simultaneously watching a car crash in slow moyion and super speed and reverse. It was nothng short of a shit show and I had no clue how to react.
That's not wholly true. There was only one reaction, and I wish I could say that I wasn't in public when the crying started and I was on the phone to my mum wailing about how it was gone. I probably sounded like a four year old who had lost their bear, but in that moment, there was no greater loss to me than this novel. There are still very few things which I feel more of a sense of the loss of.
The worst thing, to me, because I can be a bit odd about these things, is that this loss is undescribable. Devastated does not cut it. Heartbroken, nowhere near. Even to state that I feel heartshattered and inconsolable does not convey the gravity of how I felt, and the problem with that was it made me doubt myself. I sincerely thought, though have since brought myself to reason, sincerely believed that if I were unable to convey something of that immensity, something which was so inherently a part of me, what that loss meant, to my mother, what good could this novel have been anyway? If I couldn't ensure that she understood my helplessness, my need to change the unchangeable, move the unmoveable, my need to face a different reality than the one which I was presented with (though the only reality I really wanted was the one I had been writing on my laptop) how on earth could I convey a made up idea to a reader? My only conclusion then was that I couldn't. My conclusion now is that I was hysterical, and not in my usual haha sense. Hysteria had overtaken and no one can understand a hysterical person, much less take them seriously when they are professing that they shall never write again. Granted, had anyone told me I was hysterical and it would all be better in the morning, I would have been highly likely to throw something heavier than one of my shoes at them.
I probably still couldn't put that loss into words. I'm trying, but this is more like, these are the events, rather than a this is how it felt. I am mourning the loss. No one died, but it felt like someone did. It still does. I don't trust my laptop right at this moment - mature, I know. I wake up and am excited that it's still NaNo and I won already, and then I remember, my novel is gone. I had a few moments, no, hours, of not really even feeling like a writer anymore. I have picked up the pen to go back to it, but I'm writing around it. Part of me cannot bring myself to jump back in and re-write the parts I had already done. This wasn't some half baked first draft - one of these ideas has been forming for the past year, and the other. The other is what I would imagine a somwehat life long stutter feels like. It is that sentence I have always wanted to say, but it doesn't come out right; it has never quite fit. This was the first time that I didn't think the character was periodically being a petulant child. This was the first time I didn't think her partner was an arsehole of epic proportions that she should ditch almost immediately and find someone who, if not intelligent, at least looking a bit Godly so she can just admire them even if they never say anything remotely worth listening to. I was excited to start editing. I was excited about this entire project and I have to admit that for the past almost a week, lukewarm would have been a gross over estimation of my feeling towards it. But as Freddie said, the show must go on.
Nothing can change that I won this year. Nothinng can change that I did it in 9 days. Nothing can change the fact that I knocked out a 20k day and it barely even hurt. The novel is gone, but it will not be forgotten, only revised. It's not okay, but I will be.
It still greatly winds me up though that one of the novels in this project is called All is Not Lost, but actually, most of it is.
And on that note, I will catch you later.
