I’ve been having a difficult couple weeks. One of the biggest problems was that my laptop…well, it died. In a big way. The nice computer person who looked at it first said the motherboard (apparently a very important part, as the name would suggest) was dead. Well, it later turned out that my hard drive was also damaged. They managed to salvage all of my files by copying them onto an external hard drive, and no sooner had they done that than the hard drive also died.
As a writer and teacher, with most of my stories and lesson plans/powerpoints/etc. on the computer, let’s just say it was stressful. I am so deeply thankful that everything was saved, and I’ve learned a very valuable lesson about backing up everything regularly.
One of the benefits (can a stressful thing be a benefit?) of wondering for a week if I’d lost all my stories and such is that it forced me to look back at some old work. I usually write everything by hand before typing it up. The typing process involves lots of edits and revisions, and the typed versions can end up looking very different from the original handwritten ones, but the benefit is that I have a filing cabinet full of half-begun story manuscripts and scribbles.
It was actually really fun to go back and read my old work. The strangest thing is reading over something in my own hand writing and having absolutely no memory of writing it. Have you ever had that happen? It’s a bit surreal. Just goes to show how little we remember about the past, even of our own lives (another reason why history is such an important subject–says the history teacher ;) ).
In honor of this trip to the past, I bring to you today one of my favorite poems that I wrote.
Some of you may know that I’m writing a fantasy series. Currently, I’m working on writing an excerpt from an epic poem about one of the nations in the fantasy world. If it turns out well, you can look forward to reading it here :)
That’s all for this week! In the comments, let me know what adventures you have this week :)