Oh hey, what’s this button do …

[pendamuse]

I’ve spent the last sev­eral months mop­ing about what could have been and con­se­quently have taken my eyes off  the essence of what is me - the writing.

I’m absolutely sick about that.

Last week­end when I stared down the black hole that was my writ­ing career when my lap­top decided to take a dirt nap, tak­ing essen­tially 15 years of words and pho­tos with it, I pan­icked.  I hadn’t cared much about putting words to paper, much less pix­els since the end of May, and what had been sub­mit­ted and accepted was token when com­pared to any num­ber of months in pre­vi­ous years. I’d opted out of NaNoW­riMo with a final­ity that sur­prised even me and cared not a whit about Kick­Off or log­ging or shared fre­netic word­play in semi-lit bars and cof­fee shops, and yet when Novem­ber 2 rolled around and my Sakak­ibara (if you know how I name my devices, that name will make per­fect sense to you) set­tled com­fort­ably in a cycle of reboot-cheery green screen announce­ment that it needed to reboot, I faced the very real pos­si­bil­ity that the sum of my writ­ing was for­ever lost. That alter­nate future is bleak, boys and girls.

I know in the­ory I strongly advo­cate back­ups, clouds and the redun­dant print­ing of every­thing for­ever, but I’d actu­ally neglected to back up any­thing in the last year, despite hav­ing sev­eral multi-gig SD cards, a DVR-drive, and a 1T exter­nal drive that holds noth­ing but obso­lete music files and pic­tures long since uploaded to Flickr. I was regret­ting this stag­ger­ing lack of fore­sight as the nice men at Micro­Cen­ter tried to calm a near-hysteric me. Long story that doesn’t need rehash­ing to any­one but a priest,  all of my infor­ma­tion was safely backed up, Sakak­ibara is back home, and here I sit pon­der­ing what to do next.

This was like a near death expe­ri­ence for word­smiths, one I’d not like to repeat again, and as I rein­stall 107GB worth of  my life, I’m find­ing aban­doned sto­ries, for­got­ten snips. I don’t mind telling you, I feel just a lit­tle worse about my sit­u­a­tion. I also don’t mind telling you that I feel like a fraud and I hate that, too. It’s a yucky lit­tle Shame Spi­ral and I’m hop­ping off this ride before I puke my cot­ton candy.

I’m not going to stand here and pro­claim I’m going to reded­i­cate the last 7 weeks of 2013 to writ­ing and sub­mit­ting, because only a fool lets her mouth write checks her butts can’t cash.  I can, how­ever, say that every day it gets a lit­tle bet­ter and I hope to get back into a reg­u­lar groove again.

Not just because I’d like to fin­ish *some­thing* long form this year, but because there are too many undressed babies in to many fold­ers that need to get dressed and into lov­ing homes.

This post was brought to you by Kraken Black Spiced Rum and not a wee bit of guilt.