There's such a thing as being too excited.

I've been working on a young adult (prose) book for the past couple of weeks. Just hammering out the story and the tone. I sent some preliminary stuff out to three people: the toughest critic I know, the guy that helped me with this concept years ago, and a PHD in pop culture and children's literature. They each gave me honest feedback along with an enthusiastic thumbs up.

So I've been trying to get the story together. There were several gaping holes in my plot but yesterday, while at the gym, I had an epiphany that filled one of the holes and forced the rest of the story to fall into place. I like to brag, I realize that, but I don't think I've ever been more proud of anything I've ever created than this story that was now in my head.

I ran home from the gym, showered, and went to Dremo's. I got a pint of beer and booted up the laptop. There was some weird message saying that Windows could not load my profile. I didn't want to fix the problem - I was too excited and needed to write - so I decided to allow Windows do what Windows had to do. My desktop came up, barren. When I opened Word it went through an install process. Beyond that everything seemed fine, however, and I but down 6 pages of single-space story synopsis for the first book with some add-on for two additional books.

I wrote my ass off, leaving as they were closing down Dremo's.

Got home and busted out the memory stick to back up the document. My old profile loaded up just fine this time, however, and now I can't find the document anywhere. I tried several programs, searched the deepest and darkest places of my laptop but I'm coming up with nothing. I'll have to rewrite the document.

But, wow...talk about a momentum killer. I was ready to start putting down pages today and, instead, I need to redo what I did yesterday.

I think there's a lesson to be learned here; not sure what it is, though.

This entry was posted by Jason, on Wednesday, November 7, 2007. You can leave your response.