Update from the Darkside
Mother, I've just had a terrible nightmare...
It started this month when I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) by starting work on a new novel titled "Comstock". It was all mapped out. I started thinking awhile back about the bond between a dog and its owner and how that might transcend the terrors of this world. I thought about what "Marley and Me" would look like if it were a horror novel, and then it was "gentlemen, start your engines". I also started work on a short story called "The Finger", about a single mother who one day finds a severed finger in her ten-year-old daughters overalls while doing her wash and what the cause-and-effect of that might look like. I got to work. I carved out time wherever I could. In between classes at school. At home, as soon as the moon dropped out of the sky. Whenever and however! And I started racking up words like never before. The writing gods were smiling down upon me and I had never felt so alive when...my flashdrive was corrupted and I lost 40 pages of manuscript from my novel and the entire short story altogether. Everything-gone...oh, the lament I felt-the dread and the sickness and the nausea-the sleepless nights-the night terrors-black sunshine-dirty black summers and icicle eyes-a dance with death and a waking fog the likes of which I have never known-culminating-building towards the climax-BUILDING-BUILDING-UNTIL I PARKED MY CAR ONE NOVEMBER NIGHT IN THE BREAKDOWN LANE OF THE BEN FRANKLIN BRIDGE AND STEPPED OUT AND THEN STEPPED UP ONTO THE RAIL AND STOOD TO FULL HEIGHT AND PEERED DOWN AT THE STILL, BLACK WATER AND ON INTO OBLIVION AND LIFTED ONE FOOT AND...............yeah, none of that happened, but I was pretty inconsolable although my wife tried her very best. I was pretty hard to live with for about 48 hours and I hated the sound of my own complaining after a while, but I couldn't just shut up and deal. It took me a couple days before I could sit back down and touch the keyboard, that I'm not making up although it probably sounds pretty melodramatic. I decided that I would piece together what I had lost for both stories and just, well, draft it again as best I could from memory. And you know what, I have come to realize that this was also The Writing Gods at work. They probably didn't have the heart to tell me that what I had written (and lost) probably sucked big time and it would need a re-do anyhow. So they wiped my drive clean and then they sat back and they just waited for me to step up. To accept the challenge of beginning again. I put down a word. Then another. Then, I popped on Green Day's "Revolution Radio", "Les Miserables", "The Godfather Part III Soundtrack", and before I knew it I had written it all back into existence. And here's the catch...it's better. It doesn't suck!? And I learned a couple valuable lessons from the whole damned experience. Always back up your stuff (duh). And don't be afraid of a second draft. The first draft does not a writer represent. It will suck because it is seriously raw material. But everything happens for a reason.
As for the night terrors, black sunshine and icicle eyes, okay, that's my reality...but I wouldn't have it any other way.
