Happy Memorial Day Weekend!
Even though I am happy to have this 3 day weekend with plans to take our children to an air museum and to pay our respects at a local National cemetery, I want to apologize to all of you for not posting anything these last 2 weeks. There’s a good reason for this.
A few weeks ago, I spilled coffee on my laptop. I should have turned it off right away but I didn’t think anything got inside the laptop because the coffee pooled on the keys of the keyboard. I cleaned it but the laptop turned off. I waited a week before turning it on again and it does boot up. The mouse works but I cannot type. The actual keyboard isn’t functional.
Here’s the bad part:
The finished and completed manuscript of The Nationalist was on that computer. This includes other important files and the completed version of The Shoes that Charlotte Wore that was solely written in Microsoft Word and not backed up to cloud storage.
The good part:
I started writing The Nationalist on Google docs so there is a copy of it there. I’ve been going through it but since it is not updated, there are missing chapters I have to rewrite from scratch -which just so happens to be the next couple of chapters that I need right now! Also, I was able to retrieve a latest copy of The Shoes that Charlotte Wore because I had emailed the complete thing to a few authors for their feedback.
So while I sort out this self-inflicted catastrophe, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully I can just get the laptop repaired for a reasonable amount and backup everything that I failed to backup. If not, I’ll be writing those chapters from scratch.
In other news, I participated in #PitDark pitching parting on twitter a few weeks ago too. It was a lot of fun to not only read other author pitches, follow other authors and publishers, but to brush up on my own “elevator pitch” of my stories. I wrote, rewrote, pitched and repitched. Fun, but I didn’t catch the eye of any agency. But that’s ok because I got to study some of the other posts in which agents did like and see how these authors pitched their stories.
Even though there are some upsets I’m going through with this writing career, I am staying positive and optimistic. I know the process is slow-going. It takes a long time to write a story, longer still to edit it, even longer to have other people give you constructive feedback in which you may find yourself editing again and again. So, I will just take this one day at a time. I will enjoy the process of creating something special. I will learn from my mistakes, grow, and continue to write.
I anticipate being able to post a new chapter by next Friday to The Nationalist. Wish me luck with getting the laptop fixed and I hope you all have a great 3-day Memorial Day weekend too.