True story
OK. So I'm going down the list of things I've got to get done today (Logic reading, Check! Logic problems, Check!), and I come to probably the most time consuming of the lot: for Intro to Creative Writing, 750 word Introduction. That is, I was given a set of questions about meself and told to answer in 750 or more words. Easy enough, I figure. I set up the formating, decide on a style, and write.
I panic before I get done with the second paragraph.
First, though, some background:
The midterm assignment for English during my Senior Year of High School (I think all caps are needed) was to write three essays. One a how-to, one a memory, and one a work of fiction. Two, as I recall, were to be checked off, and the third was to be graded. Ms. Wilson was a great teacher who got fired at the end of the year for some inane reason. I chose to have the work of fiction be the one to be graded, wrote an intriguing opening sentence-pair (There was and is a man called One-Eye Paul Hinson. Where the “One-Eye” came from, I have no idea.), and looked to see where things developed by there.
Six or so pages later, I found myself apologizing to Ms. Wilson, telling her that the story just slipped away from me a bit, and I didn't know how long it would take to finish, but it didn't want to be over in time for the due-date. She gave me a hug and took the proffered pages; that's the kind of teacher she is.
I worked on it a little bit over the next few months, and when Senior Project time came around (at Williams, Senior Projects are where seniors take the last two weeks of classes to do something else with their lives. Something constructive. Say, work on a novel), I spent two weeks adding 15,559 words to the 4,705 I'd already accumulated (I've still got the "Senior Project Journal.doc" on my hard disk, at least). In the year-and-change that followed Friday, May 28, 2004, the last day of the Senior Project, I continued to write, off and on. Never very much, true, but I did. I believe, at last standing, I was at around 25 thousand words. Not a novel by any means, including those what count, but on it's way.
And then, I got my new laptop. Rember that? Remember the whine of the fan as we booted it up for the first time? Remember the feel of the virgin keyboard as we entered registration information? Remember the late-night iTunes marathon, the reaccumulation of boookmarks, the uninstalation of useless crap and the instalation of Firefox?
Remember transferring every single item in the "My Documents" folder from the old laptop to the new? No? Well apparently neither do I, because against all rhyme, reason, and remembrance, that isn't what happened at all.
Although I moved plenty of unimportant files, like that terrible topology paper I wrote back in tenth grade, and a password protected file called "delphi.doc" whose contents are as beyond my ken as the password that could set my wondering to rest, somehow lost in the shuffle was the correct copy of "One Eye Paul.doc" Easly the one file I'd want to have most. The fact that I didn't know I'd forgotten it until I needed a word-count from it for my introductory essay is most embarrassing.
Somehow, however, I have three backup copies: one the original copy I handed in back in December of 2003, one from slightly later along, and one (it appears) from just after the Senior Project ended.
And, to add injury to insult, I'm reasonably certain I deleted most of my files in order to give Zoë (my little sister) a laptop that she could use without looking at files I'd rather not have her see.
So. At the moment, I'm hoping that one of the following is true. A: Since I somehow missed copying the file, I also missed deleting the file; B: I didn't empty the Recycling Bin; C: I've got a duplicate copy somewhere else on said computer, perhaps in a Temp file; D: there's a way to recover deleted files (I'm pretty sure there is, but I'm not sure how easy it is to do); or E: I can rewrite the thousand plus words that I cranked out this summer (I know for a fact that, as of April 2005, the best copy to date was on my desktop, safe and sound) with minimum loss.
The Sour grapes principle reminds me that I was hardly likely to finish the story, but in honesty I'm really not happy with myself at this specific moment. Well done, sir. Well done indeed.
Two steps forwards...
I panic before I get done with the second paragraph.
First, though, some background:
The midterm assignment for English during my Senior Year of High School (I think all caps are needed) was to write three essays. One a how-to, one a memory, and one a work of fiction. Two, as I recall, were to be checked off, and the third was to be graded. Ms. Wilson was a great teacher who got fired at the end of the year for some inane reason. I chose to have the work of fiction be the one to be graded, wrote an intriguing opening sentence-pair (There was and is a man called One-Eye Paul Hinson. Where the “One-Eye” came from, I have no idea.), and looked to see where things developed by there.
Six or so pages later, I found myself apologizing to Ms. Wilson, telling her that the story just slipped away from me a bit, and I didn't know how long it would take to finish, but it didn't want to be over in time for the due-date. She gave me a hug and took the proffered pages; that's the kind of teacher she is.
I worked on it a little bit over the next few months, and when Senior Project time came around (at Williams, Senior Projects are where seniors take the last two weeks of classes to do something else with their lives. Something constructive. Say, work on a novel), I spent two weeks adding 15,559 words to the 4,705 I'd already accumulated (I've still got the "Senior Project Journal.doc" on my hard disk, at least). In the year-and-change that followed Friday, May 28, 2004, the last day of the Senior Project, I continued to write, off and on. Never very much, true, but I did. I believe, at last standing, I was at around 25 thousand words. Not a novel by any means, including those what count, but on it's way.
And then, I got my new laptop. Rember that? Remember the whine of the fan as we booted it up for the first time? Remember the feel of the virgin keyboard as we entered registration information? Remember the late-night iTunes marathon, the reaccumulation of boookmarks, the uninstalation of useless crap and the instalation of Firefox?
Remember transferring every single item in the "My Documents" folder from the old laptop to the new? No? Well apparently neither do I, because against all rhyme, reason, and remembrance, that isn't what happened at all.
Although I moved plenty of unimportant files, like that terrible topology paper I wrote back in tenth grade, and a password protected file called "delphi.doc" whose contents are as beyond my ken as the password that could set my wondering to rest, somehow lost in the shuffle was the correct copy of "One Eye Paul.doc" Easly the one file I'd want to have most. The fact that I didn't know I'd forgotten it until I needed a word-count from it for my introductory essay is most embarrassing.
Somehow, however, I have three backup copies: one the original copy I handed in back in December of 2003, one from slightly later along, and one (it appears) from just after the Senior Project ended.
And, to add injury to insult, I'm reasonably certain I deleted most of my files in order to give Zoë (my little sister) a laptop that she could use without looking at files I'd rather not have her see.
So. At the moment, I'm hoping that one of the following is true. A: Since I somehow missed copying the file, I also missed deleting the file; B: I didn't empty the Recycling Bin; C: I've got a duplicate copy somewhere else on said computer, perhaps in a Temp file; D: there's a way to recover deleted files (I'm pretty sure there is, but I'm not sure how easy it is to do); or E: I can rewrite the thousand plus words that I cranked out this summer (I know for a fact that, as of April 2005, the best copy to date was on my desktop, safe and sound) with minimum loss.
The Sour grapes principle reminds me that I was hardly likely to finish the story, but in honesty I'm really not happy with myself at this specific moment. Well done, sir. Well done indeed.
Two steps forwards...