From Scratch

See, this is why you always, always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS - did I mention always? - back up your files.

A week ago, the hard drive on my school laptop simply died, and along with it the last ten thousand or so words of the most recent novel I was working on. A month of work. Gone. Kaput. Adios. Adieu. So long. Farewell. Al wiedersehen. Goodnight. Goodbye.

The IT crew at Grove City College generously replaced my hard drive, free of charge under warranty. I just had to pay for shipping. Upon getting back my laptop today, though, I found that all of my files had been saved from the toasted hard drive...save the ones I most desperately needed. I don't know how. It was just those ones. Just one novel. Well, I guess I should be happy it was just that one, but it's the only one I've been working on for the past month. If I had lost anything else, it wouldn't have mattered because it hasn't been altered in forever.

So...my project now is to either reconstruct or completely recreate the lost four chapters of my most recent work Seventh. Have you ever had a dream so vivid and so beautiful that you wanted to keep it in your mind forever? But of course you wake up the next morning and can only remember snippets and pieces of it. It's impossible to ever have that exact same dream again, no matter how much you want to. (Unless you're one of those people who has reoccurring nightmares, which, in you're case, I don't envy you a bit.)

That's where I'm at right now. I'm trying to remember the dream. I get snatches of it sometimes, and I try to write them down as soon as they come back to me. But that's about all I have: ideas. The words, the beautiful words, are gone.

Now I get to fill in the blanks. Hopefully, it won't be a shadow of what I had.

Hopefully, it will be better than before.