A Moment of Silence...

Ninety-four pages.

Five chapters.

That is how much of Hero's Quest I lost when my laptop died a little more than a month ago. I'd backed up what I had written in the middle of June and then just never packed it up after that, though the thought crossed my mind several times.

I knew I'd lost a lot of it - actually, close to a third of what I'd written - and had been scared to take a look at the real damage until now. I was four chapters away from the end. Now, having to recreate my own work, and some of it having been some of the best stuff I'd written on the project, that's not just discouraging. It's downright depressing.

I stopped thinking about it after the laptop crash. I couldn't face the reality of that loss. Now, I've got to get used to the shock of just how much was lost and rebuild it in my own mind. I'm not giving up on the project. I've got to give it time however to regain the confidence that was lost by having my legs kicked out from underneath me.

Hero's Quest will get written. But as it is, I'm not ready to work on it yet. The pain is still too new.

UPDATE: The more I think about it, the harder this task seems. I'd written some of the most emotionally raw stuff that I'd ever put on paper in those five lost chapters. That's not a journey I want to take again. Not right now. I'm seriously considering taking the novel and starting from the beginning and doing a revision of what I've got left just to get me to the point where I can write the emotional scenes again.

This is not something I look forward to.