A glitch

I was preparing to blog about getting started on the next book in the the universally-beloved, award-winning** children’s series the BugVerse Chronicles, A Bug’s Friend, but then the universe glitched: I can not find my mockup of the book.

The mockup for A bug’s nap…

I know I’ve worked on it, scribbling ideas about what Bug and Butterfly can and cannot do together now that they’re both “adults” — Butterfly now has wings and is larger and they have to work around each other’s individual abilities and limitations.

But the mockup is nowhere to be found. I have ransacked my temporary downstairs study (aka the dining room), the adjacent living room, my book bag, everywhere. It has vanished.

I am reminded of Edward Gibbon, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the relief he must have felt upon finishing the manuscript for this “dammed thick book,” as the Prince of Wales described it — only to have his maid start a fire with all that useless paper. He had to rewrite the entire book from memory.

The same thing happened to T.E. Lawrence: While changing trains in 1919, he lost his nearly complete manuscript of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and had to rewrite it.

And Ernest Hemingway’s wife lost all of his earlier writings — and the carbon copies — when she got off a train to buy a bottle of water and the suitcase containing his manuscripts was stolen.

So will I have to reconstruct all of A Bug’s Friend from memory? All 12 pages of it??

Probably. At the moment, my brain is rebelling that it has to dredge up all those ideas that I had committed to paper so that I didn’t have to remember them, but I’m sure the universe will settle down and the brain will begrudgingly cough up the goods.

Ugh. I suppose I could engage in some TASK AVOIDANCE and actually start composing the one or two pieces that I’ve been asked to compose.