This cartoon from Hugh MacLeod about sums it up. Ah the craziness and sleeplessness of my life right now. And on top of that my car battery died last week. And this weekend my hard drive died. I lost a month's worth of work and all my niffty little ABC graphics that I'd been posting to my A to Z challenge posts.
The night that I realized what had happened to all my files that hadn't been backed up in the past month, I started hunting around for any "signs" that were in there. The obvious "sign" was stop doing the A to Z challenge, you weren't that good at it anyway, and now you have no spiffy graphics. And I was like, okay, I can deal with that.
I thought about what I was really disappointed to have lost. Edits on two short stories which had taken me days each. This affirms how much I love those stories and how much hope I have for them. And how desperately close I was to having them finished--gah! Redoing those edits will be my first priority.
I lost 3000 words of a 5000 word novel start. I lost 2500 words of another novel start (the entire first scene and the entire novel b/c I'd just started it this past weekend).
Realization: what the hell am I doing with so many "started" novels?
Sign: I wasn't all that disappointed they were gone.
I got all morose for one evening. But I've shaken it off. I've been too busy to do otherwise. And I've not gotten enough sleep lately to be anything but efficient. A week of student conferences capped by presenting a conference paper is a schedule that is working very hard to make me forget what that "sleep" thing is.
