377 Days - Blog #37, things that live on the old laptop

Provoked by a random inspiration, I decided to look up an old manuscript.  By old, I mean 2010.  Something I wrote for Nanowrimo of that year.  Something I knew wasn’t quite finished.  Something I hadn’t even transferred to my now one year old laptop.  But fortunately I still keep the old laptop on my desk (because the current one floats from room to room in the downstairs) and was able to download and upload the file containing four different versions of said manuscript.

Somewhere around 11pm last night I started reading it.  I honestly expected to find the clumsy brain dump that Nanowrimo inspires.  But actually, it surprised me.  I forgot most of the story, except the premise.  Weird how I forget what I lived with for four weeks… and a month or two of editing after.  But it grabbed me, enough to keep me up beyond midnight and then use up the last morning of my vacation.

I was disappointed that it wasn’t finished.  Or, I should say resolved.  Apparently I reached that 50,000ish word threshold and stopped.  Well, I stopped in December.  And true to Nanowrimo rules, I got to that word count by leaving cut scenes in.  I have a tendency to cut things and move them to the bottom of the manuscript (lest I decide to use all or some of it as I edit).  I was very disappointed that the last ten pages were those deposits and not the end of a story.

I know what happened.  I put that aside (maybe with the intention of returning) and went back to An Ever Fixed Mark.  I self-published two months later.  And then… well… that book took over my concentration.  And the book I called Messy Perfect faded out of focus.

It turns out I also wrote a blog about the manuscript in 2010.  And it actually sums things up better than the last two paragraphs I just deleted.  So click the hyperlink if you’re curious.

I’m a great believer of taking a step back to find perspective.  Especially in writing.  A little amnesia helps a great deal, because it also diminishes self doubt.  It provokes inspiration.

A random aside to this.  I was writing it four years ago.  And then it was the revival of a premise from five years before that.  One thing I do remember about writing this in 2010, I lamented the fact that I could have a character who was killed in Afghanistan five years after I came up with the idea.  And how very, very tragic is it that four years after that I have the same thought?

All this to say, I guess… I’ve a new writing project while the other manuscript continues to percolate on a back burner.  Maybe that one needs the amnesia, while this one can channel my creativity.