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Where Words Meet

When It’s One of Those Days, Take Notes

This has been one of those days you know you should curl up and hide from, but after wading through it, I have come to the conclusion that it can end on a positive twist. It can inspire me to write this essay, and that is how I intend to banish it from my mind, heart, and life. Actually – it started last night.

Let’s be accurate.

It started Saturday. I woke up in the morning, and my machine – before it would log me on – informed me that the gobbledygook log had failed to write to memory space alpha-centauries and there might be corruption. It recommended I restart and let check disk fix my problems for me. Instead, I ignored it, and it went away. All weekend my machine functioned just fine – I edited chapters, I wrote new words on a couple of stories. All was good.

Then, before bed last night, I told the silly thing to restart. I figured it was a good time to flush out all the bad data and make sure there wasn’t really something wrong. Foolish man, who should know better. I even failed to send off two revised chapters to a ghost-writing client because I could do it this morning.

Of course, none of that happened. What did happen was a black screen with the words “Disk read failed, press Control Alt Delete to reboot,” which, in turn, did nothing.

Many folks would have started kicking the machine at this point or applied a hammer, but since this is what I do for a living, I just heaved a heavy sigh. This isn’t a big sob-story about lost data, I didn’t lose data. The computer is no good – but I managed to limp it to life, get my data, and transfer it to another machine. I’m pretty good at this stuff, and all is well in e-mail and data land…though the wallet is thinner.

Throughout the day, things progressed in the expected direction. A network server pretended to be down and kept me in a hot closet for three hours. Ketchup squirted all over hell and back when I tried to put it on my sandwich. I paid a bill on line and put in $1800 instead of $180. Every time I try to do something, I am reminded it’s a bad idea.

And here’s my point. The emotions you go through, and the situations that arise from days when nothing goes right, are wonderful story fodder. One of the things authors do best is torture their characters, and to get that pain and suffering down in words is much easier after a day or two like I’ve just suffered through.

Sometimes I wonder if authors are just trying to work out their own issues when they get a little too hard on their protagonists. In Stephen King’s novels it seems that no matter how much you root for the good guys (or at least the guys he’s made you like) to get past their troubles and find a moment of happiness, it is not to be. They lose jobs, loved ones, pets, and quite often their lives, and no matter how close they come to solving their problems, something always prevents it. Someone unexpected shows up. A portal to another dimension opens. Someone gets shot, or sick, or falls in love with the wrong person, despite all the good reasons not to do so.

And readers love it. Probably it’s nice, for a change, to see someone else taking the fall.
In any case, this day is coming to a close. I won’t say it’s past all the difficulties, because only a fool would say that…but I’ve made it past quite a number of them, and good things have happened as well. For one thing, I have this shiny new computer to write this essay on, supper was good, and I spilled none of it on myself – and Guitar Hero Aerosmith came home to live with us. How can that be bad?

DNW

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1. 30 Days, 50,000 words… How, and Why?
2. Notes from a Shameless Dabbler
3. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
4. The King of Bad Days
5. Random Notes from a Writing Life

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