I while back the website that hosts where I work on my stories had a server issue.  It kept me from writing for a day and when the site came back up I found out that the stories I had been working on were missing some of the words I had put to page.  The website had reloaded from an earlier version which explained the lost words but their version control had seemed to, at the time, gotten me back pretty much everything I had lost.

Except over the weekend, I returned to one of the chapter of the novel I’m working on to find that it’s ending stopped in mid-sentence.  I will sometimes stop work on a story in mid-sentence as I found it makes it easier to pick back up the thread of the story.  It appears the server issues of the website had affected more and older pieces than I had realized.  This includes half of the chapters I have completed on my novel.  Due to the time that has passed it seems the version backups are all gone and so I’m left without those words.  In addition, about a half dozen other works are missing some words, with some being totally lost.  All of which is of course frustrating.

Step one is to come up with a plan to backup the stories on my own devices going forward so that this doesn’t happen.

However, I’m not entirely sure what step 2 should be.  In general, I don’t edit while I’m writing.  The fantasy and sci-fi author Michael Stackpole is fond of saying that you can write a chapter twenty times or you can write twenty chapters once, you’ll learn the same things but you’ll have a lot more to show in the later case.  I tend to hold true to Stackpoles advice and don’t tend to edit or revise as I write a story.  If a change needs to happen, I make a note of it for when I do go back.  I find this keeps me from getting bogged down in perfectionism.  That said, I do go back and reread sections to make sure I’m remembering things correctly or to get me back in the correct headspace, which is in fact what my discovery of the missing words.  When I go back and do these readings I will make quick edits.

However, to go back and fix my missing words is weird because I’m not editing but recreating what has been lost, something that will need to be done, but that’s also hard to do without diving fully back into those chapters and reinvesting myself in what the characters were feeling in the moment.  That has the risk of bogging me back down in moving forward but to move forward with the fact in the back of my mind that certain scenes just aren’t actually written seems like a nagging doubt that may also derail me.

At the end of the day, I’m really just venting here.  I like the site I do my writing on (one reason I’m not ousting them in my complaint, as it’s a small and passionate team that I believe just ran into an unfortunate event) and I know I would be best to go and rewrite what I had already done, even if it slows down my other writings for a bit.

It’s the lost what if that is hard.  I’ll rewrite a scene but be left with a lingering doubt of “Was it better the first time when I was creating vice recreating.”  While I know that such doubts will fade in time as I move further into the story, it’s discouraging right now.  So, all I’ll really say is getting the story down is always a challenge, filled with many obstacles, and this is really just one more.  As a writing obstacle, the best solution at the end of the day is to just keep writing, in whatever form helps the words to continue to come easily.

Setbacks aside, I should have something ready for this week, though in coming weeks I may split some drop stories into parts to give me time to go back and get my chapters squared away (and my backups made).  As always, the goal is to keep moving forward and we’ll do that.  I hope you all have a good week and if you are facing challenges that you find your way past them.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean