The Lost Year

I lost a whole year of my life.

I want to kick myself again and again for being such a fool. My zip disk crashed, for no apparent reason, after I had planned to perform a periodic backup. I blew it off for an extra week and suddenly found that I had missed my window of opportunity. When I popped in the disk, it clunked and clicked, and I think it even chewed up the drive(s) themselves because other disks work before I try that one but no longer work for any disk afterwards.

I saved A Single Broken Thread, by sheer fortune, and I hadn’t worked on The Silver Horn for so long that my old files were still current. And the Hope book and its iterations were on a different disk, so it survived the devastation.

But I lost all of my journal entries. ALL of them. Every freaking one.

Every day, I pop open a file for each thought that comes into my head and save it. Sometimes I don’t write a file for a week, sometimes I save three or four a day.

All of my bursts of inspirations, moments of clarity, pertinent events, ideas for future books – all of them, gone. Chewed up on that damnable disk.

For someone who lives in his head, it was literally like losing a year – being in a coma. I have no record of where my mind has been, my memories wiped clean. Part of me just wants to die, it feels that bad. There are thoughts there that I am afraid I will never think again… and not even know it, since I’ve forgotten them already.

The odd thing is a small sense of freedom, of being freed from clutter. I don’t know what to make of that. Maybe the only ideas worth saving are whichever ones that come back to me, and the others were just baggage for a cerebral packrat as myself to carry.