Who's got my back?

Today I thought I lost my Nano book. For those of you who are not keeping up, and you know who you are, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. About 150,000 of my closest friends and I, are writing 50,000 word novels in 30 days. The deadline is midnight on November 30. Since today is the 25th, I'm pretty far along. When my word count suddenly dropped from 41,000 to 18,000 and the first huge part of my book was missing, I have to admit to some panic.

I'm trying to keep up with the times, here. I got adventurous and started using a web-based writing tool called Yarny that would store my GAN (Great American Novel) in the cloud. You know, THE CLOUD. The only way I can conceive of this, being almost entirely non-technical, is that it's up in heaven with Jesus, who promised, cross his heart, that he'd take care of it and not lose it no matter what, because he's way more reliable than the hard drive on my li'l ol' laptop. So I decided to take a leap of trust. I didn't even back it up, except part of the beginning, when I was trying to see what the "export" button was all about.

Now, I trust Jesus. If my book is up in heaven, I believe implicitly that it will be there, even if I temporarily misplace it through my own lack of know-how. Which is what happened today. I love to sit and write in my little nest at the top of the house. I sit on the old, soft couch in front of the open window, Buddy jumps up and falls asleep beside me, I'm rockin' out to Bach or Chopin on the Pandora and all is well with the world. Trouble is, I keep forgetting that the CLOUD requires a strong internet connection, and up there it's a long ways from the router or whatever that thingy is that makes internet go. Two little bars on my connect-o-meter. Sooner or later I wind up with an error message saying it can't save. I strike my head in a "coulda had a V-8" moment and reluctantly relocate to the lower regions of the house.

But today it wasn't just that it couldn't save --- it ate my book. Gobbled it up with only a few scraps leftover. Five days before the end of month. What could I do? I shot off email to the Yarny Gods and went to buy a Christmas tree with my family.

Now that's the point of this long, sad tale. My usual MO is to freak out, cry, threaten violence on myself and/or the world at large, slide into a hopeless trance and eat a pint of ice cream. I did NOT do that today. It was helpful that Jill was in a good mood, and Mom was stable. In spite of my deep-seated anxiety, we drove to Durham to buy a tree from the drug addicts, like we always do ---- they're in recovery and raising money --- and then stopped to eat lunch outdoors in the warm sunshine. Gradually my tension headache went away, my eye almost stopped twitching and I even started to laugh. I enjoyed being out with these women I love. I was in the moment. I even started thinking, on the way home, that if it was gone, I could still pull it out with a lot of writing time and it would probably be better the second time around.

There are opportunities every day to do things differently. I don't always take advantage of them. I also think I don't notice when I do. But every so often, on a day like today, I get to see the growth that allows me to have deeper, warmer relationships with others, and be kinder to myself in the process.

I got my book back. Tech support is a wonderful thing. My book is back in the cloud, intact and on track. It's also on my hard drive and a flash drive. It's all very well to believe in heaven, and maybe Jesus really is keeping my book in his pocket, but it never hurts to back things up. And back it up again. Lesson learned.