Grrrrrrr!

I am... aggravated.

Yesterday, I began writing about a subject dear to my heart—one I obsess about; one of my most magnificent obsessions. I was "in the moment"—words like dragon's fire out of my heart and through my fingers and onto the screen. It was the real thing...

And then just as I was ready to post, BlogPress, the iPad application I was writing in, crashed. Crashed hard. So hard, in fact, that it won't even start up.

I shrieked aloud (frightening my cat). I raged. I didn't throw my iPad down on the floor, but I was tempted. What I lost was good. It was important (at least to me). It was cathartic and significant and I really wanted to share it with those interested. And then it was gone.

Today, I'm not as angry, but I am sad. I'm grieving. I'm even experiencing the "denial" phase of grief; I won't delete and reinstall BlogPress because I want to believe that the words are still there somewhere, and that maybe the next time the program is updated I'll be able to recover them.

Sometimes words are just words, and sometimes they're like children, precious and full of promise and potential. These were my children, and I lost them at the moment of their birth. You may say I'm making too big a deal of it and I can't argue, but since I don't have children, only two things will survive my eventual death: the memories of my relationships and my words.

In the Terry Pratchett novel The Truth (and others), the dwarves make a big fuss about things like erasing blackboards and using movable type. For the dwarves, words have a power and identity of their own, and there is something deeply wrong about erasing them or breaking them down into parts (letters).

As a writer, I believe that. I believe that (sometimes, at least) words are vitally important. And BlogPress killed some hundreds of my word-children.

Sure, I should have saved early and saved often (as I remind my students to do), but in the giddy ferment of ideas, sometimes I forget.

That makes it at least partly my fault.

Add guilt to the grief.

Grrrrrrr.