It's not like me to lose things.  I joke about that cup of coffee I can never find, or the car keys or glasses that hide from me . . . but the truth is that I just don't lose things.  Maybe I should rephrase that and say that it's not my nature to be absent minded, scatter-brained, forgetful.  I'm usually prompt for meetings, seldom forget where I'm supposed to be, and I'm almost always aware of the time.  I've never had to keep notes, write down things as reminders.

But . . . I've lost two novels.

I started writing seriously at the age of 43.  I'd written journal articles, newspaper and magazine articles, stuff like that over the years, but I'd never written fiction.  Growing up around literature and with parents who loved language, loved to read and write, was good for me.  I didn't take to it like a duck to water, that's for sure.  It was forced on me, expected of me to be a reader.  And I wrote things at an early age, some poems and some stories even back before I got to fifth grade.  My mother saved some of that suff, and I've still got it. 

But . . . I've lost two novels.

College wasn't my best lick at education, that's for sure.  I struggled the first few years, then caught a groove and started making good grades.  I majored in Literature for awhile but ended up with a degree in history.  But political science interested me most, and I got a M.A. in that.  I did doctoral work at two different universities on two different occasions, earing some 150 hours beyond a masters degree.  I didn't finish either doctoral program, but it wasn't the dissertation that stopped me.  Writing was my strong point.  The research papers pulled me through, got me A's in almost every graduate class I took.  And, I still have almost every paper writen for those seminars in grad school.

But . . . I've lost two novels.

The first novel I lost really didn't have a name, just a working title.  I had some 600 pages of manuscript, some five years invested in research and writing.  Here at the Campo Madrone shop is an old Gateway computer, a very old one from back in the early 1990s - no windows, just the old doss system.  I have the old floppy disks, and somewhere on them is that novel.  The local computer gurus say they can probably get me disk copies of that novel . . . but it's iffy.

Last summer, while trying to make a back-up disk off my Toshiba laptop, I lost another novel.  The damn machine suddenly went nuts and started duplicating copies of my documents on the hard drive, literally hundreds of each document.  You can imagine what that did to the computer, and I never got a copy of anything.  I don't handle situations like that well.  In fact, had my wife not been present, that computer might now be nothing more than a pile of chips and fragments.  But she took it away from me and then deleated the duplicated files.  She didn't have a list of what to save, just deleated all the copies with numbers indicating they were duplicates.

I don't blame her.  It's my fault because I should've done it.  I should've taken it to the shop right then, had the experts work on it.  But I didn't, and she ended up deleating a novel I'd been working on for a year.  The guys at the computer place couldn't retrieve it, and I had no copies.  A stupid thing on my part all the way around.  You'd think a writer would be more careful, but I wasn't.

That second lost novel haunts me.  It was good work, and I knew it was some of the best stuff I'd ever written.  I tried to write down as much as I could in the way of notes to remember it, and I keep trying to find time to start it again in hopes I can remember it.  I tried several times, but it's just too frustrating.  Even if you remember the plot, the story, the composition itself is gone . . . and you can't get back things like that.  But that story still wakes me up in the middle of the night, like it has on this night.

What was his name, the character who started the story?  Was that in Ojinaga?  And what was the name of the cafe where he met the priest?  The girl, what was her name?  And the street, was it Calypso or . . . Canary?

And it's three o'clock in the morning, dammit!

I'm too old for this shit!

PMC, 2/10/08