Amanda,
I know that its like to lose an entire computer. Tons of work. Not only your data, but your machine, all gone.
It sucks.
No other way around it, and I know when I went through it, I indulged myself in a dark time of depression, booze, and loathing.
I had a choice, when this happened. And I didn’t take it.
I was midway through the second draft of my novel. It was a high fantasy romp, based on a D&D game that I had played for 5 years. (Yes, I’ve got serious dork cred.) I had a writing partner for a few years, he was the DM of the game. We created a 12-issue graphic novel series (never drawn, never published, but beautifully scripted) and moved on to other things. I decided I wanted to tell the backstory of my favorite characters, from boyhood to manhood, and wrote a novel.
The second draft was moving along sluggishly, and I was unemployed, with a newborn baby, focusing my time on being a struggling writer. Living off credit cards. I went into town one day to meet with a friend and play a D&D scenario which would, I justified, count as research for my book. He bailed on me, so I went out to lunch with my wife and baby at Wildwood, one of our favorite restaurants – a little pricey, but I was always trying to manifest a better life by living the finer side, even when I couldn’t afford it.
When I went out to my car, I saw exactly how much I couldn’t afford it.
The back window was smashed open. My laptop, my bookbag, my camera, my cell phone, my 3 new D&D books, all gone.
The hardest was my data.
Newborn pictures of my baby girl that I never backed up. The entire second draft of my novel. All gone.
The lessons learned have stuck with me. Now, I back up regularly. (www.backblaze.com, peace of mind for five bucks a month.) I also keep an external hard drive and a spare machine, so if I lose my laptop, I can be up and running again within hours.
This kind of protection is only diligently created after a loss; so, unfortunately, welcome to the club. I know you’re going to be better for it from here on out.
The choice I neglected, you may be facing as well.
I looked around at the shattered remnants of my creative life, and I saw stacks of spiral bound notebooks. Relics from a past of slam poetry and loneliness. Notebooks I always planned to go through and cull out the really beautiful nuggets.
Given my emotional state at the time, it would have been perfect to revisit those tearful years, slice out the pages that could add up into a different novel, the story I always wanted to tell.
I toyed with it for a few weeks, and never got around to it. The notebooks are still waiting for any type of use, carted off into boxes in a storage unit in Portland.
I rebuilt, slowly, and found my way back into creativity. It took a detour into professional life for a few years, so I could learn how to support a family as well as indulge my creative side.
I see the experience of losing my laptop as a wakeup call. I was being lazy, which is all too easy to slip into as a writer. It is such a fragile state of circumstances that allow the writing trance to be invoked, it is easy to put off changing things in favor of keeping things normal enough to keep on writing. This easily leads to stagnation.
Now, I think, is a good time to ask you the question I’ve been sitting on:
What the hell are you still doing in Seattle?