Folks, it is very, very important to save your work.
After a harrowing and edgy day of front-end coding work, I came home and wrote. I did some other things, first: watched the rest of a movie I’d started the other night, checked in with friends, got some food. But I finally returned to what I want to be doing, what brings me the most personal joy when I accomplish it, and what people have told me is perhaps my greatest skill: I started telling stories again. Eventually, I got tired, and decided sleep was what I needed, leaving the computer on but turning off the monitors.
I forgot to hit Control+S on Notepad++ to save my work.
Windows, in its infinite wisdom, decided to automatically restart itself to install yet another critical update. I’ve been doing that manually every day for weeks, now. I guess that’s part and parcel of running Windows 7 on Balthazar. Anyway, I woke up to find the damned thing prompting me for my login information, and my heart sank into my stomach.
Now, all told, it wasn’t a lot of information. 100 words, tops. But it was the principle, the idea. I haven’t done a Flash Fiction challenge in weeks. It’s been a struggle to have the energy and focus upon returning home to sit down and really make words happen. Rising to the challenges presented by the dayjob is taking a great deal out of me, and it is not in my nature to hold a great deal back for myself. Not when expectations are so high.
I’ll see if I can manage it again tonight. And hopefully, this time, I’ll either write the whole thing out, or remember to save my damn work.
