The Day of Horrible Happenings

I have thought about addressing days of horrible happenings and how they affect my writing. I know, and see, and hear, the adage that one must write, edit, query, synopsis, regardless of what is going on In one‘s life. One must act as if one’s writing is a professional job, even if, and perhaps especially if, one is not yet a paid professional.

Well, poop.

Yesterday, I discovered that my drop box and my Scrivener were beating each other up behind my back and basically, my editing was being undone even as I saved and manually backed up. It’s a long story, so here is a much better article on it if you wants to know what was going on. (Thanks to Janet M. Carter on Twitter for linking me to that.) I don’t know if I can express the overwhelming sense of loss and frustration, the desire to lay down and be feasted upon by my cat. When the time comes, I know she will be too happy to do away with my rigid corpse. My manuscript, which I thought just needed a bit of a polish, is now in a more ragged state than I could ever have imagined. 

Then I took a gander at the old bank account, because my day wasn’t going downhill fast enough. In retrospect, I guess I’m glad I did, because my $2 US Magazine subscription (yeah, whatever, shut up) suddenly became $87 dollars. I don’t spend $87 on shit. Especially not tabloid shit. (I also have an Entertainment Weekly subscription, also for $2 SHUT UP SHUT UP AND STOP JUDGING ME!) Magazine or newspaper subscriptions are never a good idea. I get fucked over. Every. Time. So I called the 800 number my bank called me, squirmed and got indignant and got it reversed. Since I called the same day, it looks like it got stopped before it even got charged – or it looks ok so far. Fingers crossed.

At this point, I was in no shape for picking up the pages and literally beginning again. I had started a second edit, and man, had it been suh - weet. All gone. All 23,000 words I’d edited on Sunday into slices of delicious, quivering wit were just… cold cuts again. I was in no mood for acting like a grown up with a goal. So instead, I put on movies, went fangirling on Tumblr and ate my feelings with a side of ranch dressing.

They were delicious.