Just keep typing by Eric Beetner

 I recently lost 30K of a novel in progress and had to start again. What’s the biggest setback you’ve had in your writing, and how did you overcome it?

I wrote this month's questions, so that 30K that went missing? That was mine.

My hard drive had a meltdown and in an instant everything went dark. I have a backup drive, but I had been doing that most human of things and putting off for months the notices that the drive was full and could no long backup effectively. What I could recover from it were important things like photos, my music library, old writings of mine. But the book I had started back in February? Gone in an instant.

This third book in the Carter McCoy trilogy had been aborted once before. I had tossed out my original outline when I realized my bad guys weren't bad enough anymore, given the state of the world following last November's election. I decided to embrace current events in my work for the first time ever and to have my characters deal with the state of the world and the rise of fascist tactics. Now THOSE are some bad guys.

But throwing away that old outline was voluntary. It didn't get ripped away from me in a digital sinkhole.

Yes, I brooded and pouted a little. I tried data recovery at home with a friend who works in IT. When that failed I sent the hard drive away for evaluation. All this time I kept writing. I just picked up from where I'd left off and continued on toward the end of the book. I had a deadline in August, so I needed to keep moving.

When they got back to me they told me they could "likely" recover files, but it would cost nearly four thousand dollars. I told them no thank you and I embraced the prospect of starting over at the top.

When writing setbacks hit, I find the best way is to write through them. This provided a golden opportunity to do so. I recently went through another awards loss. I don't let it get me down. I write through it. If a short story gets rejected for an anthology, I pick up and write the next one. 

Many writers will tell you writing is re-writing. I'd certainly never done any re-writing on this scale, but I choose to think of my missing manuscript as a first draft. It was going to change some anyway, so why not change all of it. 

I can't obsess about the great lines I'll never get back, or some dialogue I can't remember. I have my story, I know my characters well at this point. I need to put my trust in them as well as myself. 

Compared to this, all my other setbacks seem small now. That's a positive, in the end. And there is something empowering about taking a hit this severe and making my way through it. Here we are only a week into September and I'm on the verge of finishing the full draft. I'll go back and revise (after I hit save several hundred times) but I will deliver this book only a few weeks past my deadline and my publisher has been very understanding.

I recently returned from Bouchercon in New Orleans where I told the tale to several writers who all winced and gasped as if I were telling a detailed recounting of a compound fracture. Losing work, I was told repeatedly, is maybe the number one fear writers have. 

Well, I've faced that fear and came out the other side. I may feel a little bitterness toward this book, or I may also see it as a special reminder of my tenacity in the face of tragedy. Either way, I don't think I'll repeat the process of throwing out 30,000 words any time soon.