I know it’s pathetic and tiring when someone posts long whiny bullshit about how terrible life is, how they can’t write because their muse isn’t present or they have too much homework or etc etc etc.
You know what? Just this once, I feel I have the legitimate right to bitch about life.
1) I have job woes. I love the shop, I love the boss and I love the work to death but I get paid what is possibly an illegally low wage and even that may be in question. The economic downturn has hit very hard. Our Christmas takings – supposedly the high point of the year – are only equal to our best days six months ago. The continued existence of my job is tenuous.
2) Centerlink is an incompetent organisation run by criminally under-trained staff. I recently got a letter telling me that, as I’d taken too long to complete my degree, I would no longer receive Centrelink benefits. Excuse me? I’m two years into a four year full-time degree and have yet to fail a class. I can’t do this any faster!
If Centrelink cuts me off then it’ll be weeks before we get the tangled web of bullshit sorted, and I may not have a job to sustain me through that period. Bugger. A man has to eat and pay rent, yanno.
3) I broke my hand. You saw that. Writing is my life and to not have a right hand is sometimes frustrating to the point where I want to scream. When I am mad I want to write and all this is making me VERY mad and I have to bonk out each word with the stub on the end of the cast. This post so far has taken me near half an hour. It’s… MADDENING.
4) And yet I kept writing. I hit my goal of 1000 words every day for the past month and my re-write of Weathermen advanced and I was getting REALLY happy with it. The hardest chapter was maybe 500 words from completion. All was going well. UNTIL…
Catastrophic hard-drive failure. My laptop HDD shat itself, very possibly without any chance of repair. When did I last back up? Over a month ago. 30,000 words gone.
It would be bad enough if it were a normal months worth of work, but seeing as I typed that 30,000 with my right arm in a cast it is twice as painful. It makes me sick when I think about it, and all the chances I had to bust out a quick backup. Have I flushed 100 hours of rewriting and editing down the drain? More?
The worst thing – the really emotionally deadening aspect of all this – is that I want to sit down and get straight back into it. But when I open my old iBook and stare at that huge, lumbering, chapter-2-and-3-missing text file, and then look at my right hand in the cast, and imagine banging out another 30,000 words with the nubbin on the end of the plaster…
I’m going to get another beer.
