I have been betrayed by the one I called a partner in my writing process.

Yeah, as the title says, Microsoft Word ate part of my book. 4 hours of work just gone as if it never existed in the first place.

if all that work can just disappear in a second

This isn’t something I can just forgive and forget. I have been writing almost solely on my computer for several years now. But if all of that work can just disappear in a second… that’s not a risk I can take some some 40,000 or 100,000 words in the future.

The damage wasn’t devastating; it was first draft material, and I have a good memory to recall the content well enough. But I didn’t have a copy anywhere, and the sense of loss is still prominent.

I don’t trust storing it online, lest AI plagiarizes it, and I lose my story to someone who used a prompt, and get called the thief for publishing my own work later.

I’m returning to my roots

So now I’m returning to my roots, and will be hand writing my work from here on.

I have so much content stored up that it’s going to take a while to get everything moved to analog.

You may be thinking; why not just print it? Unfortunately, that’s not a viable option. Printer ink is expensive, and the household printer and my computer don’t like each other. Last time I had to print 3 of my single page fables, I had to fiddle with it for a while and reprint one of the pages that came out wrong. I cannot do that for hundreds of pages of work.

Besides, this gives me a chance to simplify and connect with everything better. What’s a little (a lot) of writing for a writer?’

I’m focusing on transferring my in progress novel to a notebook

At the moment, my primary focus in this effort is moving my novel (in progress) to a physical notebook. During this process I’ve taken the liberty to clean up the overcomplicated wording that I have since grown out of.

The thing I didn’t expect is that I feel more connected to the words, and the work of writing as a whole, when I do it by hand. I didn’t realize there was any distance until I stepped closer.

I had actually started writing this book by hand when the idea first came to me. But had switched to digital because it was easier to edit the sentences I wasn’t happy with without damaging my paper from repeated erasing and rewriting.

Now that I’m going back to hand writing, I needed a solution to that problem. And the answer was so dang simple that I cannot believe I didn’t think of it sooner: a second notebook, a throwaway one, for the sole purpose of trying out sentences until I find one I like. Then I write the good stuff in my first draft notebook, and repeat for the entire story.

so there’s my major event of the week

So there’s my major event of the week. I even wrote this blog post by hand before typing it here to post.

On a separate note, you may have noticed that I missed Saturday’s post. That was because the internet was being so slow and finicky as of late, that I could not access my blog to post it. Sorry about that. I’ll work hard to make sure that post happens this Saturday.

I have unfortunately been so busy with all this stuff that I’m behind on my art for the blog. (let’s be honest, my procrastination is partly to blame for that). I’m going to try to catch up on that too while I continue to work on my writing.

Bad week or blessing in disguise? Time will tell.

A. G. Swift