There is something about editing that is rather fascinating and saddening to handle. But I guess in some shape or form, I would say that this is probably the real face of editing when it comes to fixing lines, the flow of sentences and making sure that the audience understands the story in a linear order. Not in the concatenated sometimes scattered order that writers get, when thinking of their own projects.
Now, that is not the full extent of editing, and it is not the saddest thing in the world. Because really, you need it to get through multiple rounds of rewriting which can make a story easier to read. So the editing is not the worst thing. It’s the matters of the rewrites that comes when the work you are creating is destroyed, sometimes, beyond repair. You could lose thousands of words, burnt to wreckage in the computer, no longer being able to be used.
As of how my computer can’t be used? The cords got wrecked to the point where the electricity pops. And it also made a flash too. So the chance of resurrecting the work is close to low. Some of the things I’ve tried to work on throughout the past couple of months, years even all got burned within it. Writing, artworks, concept artwork, plans. Gone. Now I know that I have faced this a few times before, but this one… That is probably the worst one that I have experienced so far. And this is an assumption, that could hopefully be resurrected, yet the chances could be low.
So now in terms of my current main story, Conjured Secrets… I am glad that I had a back up on that… In my kindle. So I would say that I am GLAD I had completed it and transferred it to the kindle. I have been trying to read and analyse through the work for the past couple of months, and have finally figured out some of the things that I wanted to fix…
Until that incident occurred. So currently, I have been thinking about how to edit this story. I had the thought of converting it to a word file but… There were problems that… Well, it could have nearly cost me my details. And this all happened within 48 hours. So this is not the sort of events you would of liked to have happened!
Instead I have been thinking about getting about and doing something else, and maybe try to find a way to get the word file for it later without some random video playing and then using some random viral software that said that viruses have been found on my device. Haha.. I will give it a few weeks to try to establish some routine with what I have before downloading the word document version of this.
So I decided I am not playing my biddings with the virus queen and have thought about trying to find a different approach to doing this. Sure, I may have lost alot of things, but not everything is lost. I still have my imagination, my mind and my characters. And those sorts of drafts that I have been building upon have and will make the story even better… Until around a week before my computer decided to break, Doing my style of a story has been trailing through my mind. I wrote a thousand words from Harry potter and the Philosophers Stone, just as some sort of tryout. See if it would make a difference, and to me it seemed like it made some form of difference to me.
But now I m thinking: Could I try this again… But this time, with my story? Make it seem like I am writing from another writer, and just… See if I can improve it. So this is the journey that I am going to go through, for at least a little while and see how it will unfold. And the strict word is to try to not change the way the story worls too much. Because I think it has got to the stage where it makes sense. So I will be writing the project on my phone with google docs. this is to read and analyze the work. And this is while going through it slowly through Google Docs.
Now, granted, I have no idea on how it would work, or even unfold. And it might take me at least another year to try to restructure it all. But I am hoping that throughout that process it would make the story easier to read and would hopefully make it flow better.
Knowing writers, this is something that would happen to every writer at least once in their life, so there’s this sensation of even if there is lots of progress that is lost, you’ll need to learn to adapt to it and see on how you can make your writing even better than it was before.
I will be honest, I am greatly disappointed in what has happened to the writing that I have written that is now trapped and potentially destroyed in the spark of the potentially damaged hardware on the computer. I had some of the story written up. 17000 words of one story, and thousands or so words of some other smaller projects. But maybe, this could be part of the editing process where instead of the constant rewrites where I am refining ideas, I am changing the prose and making it easier to understand.
I will probably take that time to make sure that there is back up on all of my computer devices and see if there is a chance that the file can be recovered. But to also use that as a big lesson for myself to make sure to have something in the background that is backing it up.