It's excruciating to re-write.
It's all fun and games till you make one very very stupid mistake and it all goes downhill pretty fast and furious. Yes, indeed my mood is rather sarcastic and I have every right to be so; maybe not "right" but I can, right?
Here, I was having a somewhat mundane day when all of a sudden I thought of checking my drafts. I leave drafts everywhere - peakd, my mail, hackmd, even on my phone. So you see, I leave them everywhere so they are accessible to me at all times and I can edit and add stuff as I go whenever and wherever pleases me. But for some time now I have been kind of relaxed about it and keeping my drafts at peakd only. I know, it's crazy to keep docs at so many places and it's also not ideal to keep them only in one place.
Sometimes I'm just too lazy to go the extra mile. Heck, I don't even go all the miles.
I'm almost always lazy and that's not big news. So my laziness has had me pay the price - and, I have paid in full. See, I have a handful of drafts that are still unfinished which isn't a cause for alarm right? Or, so I thought. Anyway, in my laziness, I haven't made other copies of the unfinished drafts.
So!!!! Rant time, is it? That sounds about right.
One of the frustrating things that can happen to you is when you lost your almost completed draft that you were supposed to post. Yes, that has happened to me just yesterday. Funny enough, I don't remember when I lost it but I realized I had lost it just a day before yesterday and you best believe it, it annoyed me to no end. I haven't been able to write as much as I used to at the beginning - which is why losing a draft has put me at a great disadvantage. On top of that, it took me almost 3 weeks to prepare it and I was going to publish it on the said day. Regardless of how much time and effort I have given in trying to piece together what I had initially written down, I'm coming up empty. So, not only have I managed to delete a draft but I also have no recollection of it.
I realized the value of it only after I lost it.
And suddenly I got the feeling that the lost piece of work was probably one of my best-written short stories - perhaps the realization kicked in because I had lost it. Also, the fact that most of the words have faded from my mind has had me under the impression that neither I will get it back nor I can recreate it to match exactly what it was.
You can tell me to just forget about it but it's often hard to let go.
To the best of my abilities and what I could conjure from the junk-filled brain of mine, I am once again re-writing the said piece - truth be told, it's not as satisfying as the lost one. On the contrary, the new version, still incomplete, looks like a very bad Xerox copy with ink smudges all over; a dissatisfying and disappointing feeling has nestled in.
Maybe I should just let it go and maybe not re-write it. A few things, for sure, have made their way to me and they are - sometimes ranting is okay, letting go is a wise decision but not always applicable, re-writing is a painful and glum experience but Kudos for trying, keep backups of your backups, and lastly backup are better than regrets.
I will, however, try to finish my unfinished work to the best of my abilities and make it as good as possible. That would be quite hard to achieve though but one can hope. Maybe I won't finish that piece yet and leave it for a few weeks. I have got nothing from this other than clearing out a much-needed rant that had fogged my mind.
You gotta do what you gotta do, even if it isn't wise.