As I mentioned earlier this week, I lost a days worth of writing to a bug. This depressed me immensely. Not just because I lost the writing, but because of the sheer amount of words gone in one fail swoop. I woke up that morning with a full head of steam and powered through a lot of editing and writing. Having it gone killed me, and killed my momentum. But the real problem was obsessing over the words I’d written that were now gone, which built a wall in my own brain.
When this happened on Sunday, that was it. I couldn’t write another word. I was simply devastated. Very nearly physically ill over the whole thing. By Monday morning, I was in recovery mode and trying to recreate what was lost. And I do mean ‘recreate’. I sat down and tried to pull every single word back from the abyss. Nothing less would do. This was impossible, and had the side effect of creating a wall no one could climb.
I spent the next two days pounding my fists against that wall.
Late (very late) Tuesday night (possibly Wednesday morning), I realized I had to give up in order to move forward. The words are gone. Need to form new ones. I can keep the flavor of what I built Sunday, but I’ll never be able to recreate it perfectly. Once I came to terms with that, I started pushing forward again and jumped to 61,649 words (from around 55,000).
Onwards and upwards.
