Pretty in Paper

So, that novel, the awful one, that I wrote about in my last post? It disappeared from my flash disk almost two years ago, along with a bunch of short stories, novel drafts in various stages of writing/editing, and lots of research notes. I was devastated. everything I wrote in two years and put so much time, love and effort into simply vanished. I had to start again from scratch or comfort myself with several documents that were saved to my email. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I lost everything I ever wrote. Moved on, wrote other stuff, but still heavily missed my stories.

Then two days ago, after I ran a routine virus scan of the disc, the Awful First Novel miraculously reappeared. Only that document, nothing else, stuff that would make me much happier, but I still felt like I won the lottery jackpot. It's still awful but it's there. 

On another note, I wrote nothing to The Back Butterfly in the last couple of days because I'm reading articles for my diploma paper (that's due in a year, but I love my topic--female characters in Edith Wharton's novels and short stories in the light of the American Theory of Race). Also been reading more for reviews, and gave my book blog a new design. That was a pain in you-know-what since it demanded a lot of HTML tweaking. I stopped journaling; if I have minute or two, I write anyway, so I'd rather write for my current projects.

So, now I'm going through it and it makes me giddy just like the time when I was writing it. I'm happy because I can apply all that stuff it taught me to make it better. It will demand major rewrites, or better to say, there's only about 20% percent of it that I'd actually keep. But a precious 20 % it will be (insert huge happy smile here). Let's see if there's more knowledge to be drawn--if nothing else, editorial. Never has hitting the delete button make me happier. 

Oh, joy!