The routine, or the discipline, is to wake up each morning at 4:30am. This is not what's happening in reality, more an oral fixation that's started in my brain and hasn't really developed into a full scale problem yet. The reason for such an early start is because I become less and less productive as the day goes on. I start with incredible focus and as the day fades, so does my focus. Also, that early in the morning, nobody can bother you. They can but they don't. They can't be bothered. So it's really the only time that I feel the most free from obligation, free from potential, free from being available for whoever wants to take my desperation to belong.
This morning I woke up to find that my latest working draft of "The Best Never Comes" was missing. Like, still can't find it. So there goes three weeks of work. I had edited a bunch and added a bunch of pages, approximately thirty pages lost. These weren't thirty early pages, but thirty pages of a third revision pass, which just means they were handled with extreme care and focus. Imagine an antique store of sorts, filled with lost treasures ~ or trash ~ but imagine nonetheless trying to take some of that crap out to the bin for good, and then plugging in the holes of the display with thirty much better trash treasures than the ones that you discarded. So it was a real double whammy. Losing the corrections, the fine combing of the first one hundred sixty pages of blind spot typos, word balance, and overall sentence structure. It's like taking the first one hundred sixty pages and making it easier to understand, or maybe just communicating with more precision. Making the story and the characters clearer and making sure they feel honest and worthy. This was thirty pages of that type of work.
Deep breath.
I recovered a draft I sent to a friend three weeks ago. It's enough to date. Has most of the story, minus the fine combing, sanding, rubbing or rinsing we call editing. Like panning for gold. Sometimes we have to start over and just keep going. It's all going to be ok. I'm sure the work that was done might be lost to your eyes, but the work that was done internally will show up in the next words you'll read. So I can be grateful. I am grateful. Each word matters.
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