Winter Breakdown

So, a few months back, I put out my 2020 story "Winter Break," even including it in my Female Protagonist collection.*  I vaguely remember, when I was recording it, finishing Chapter 5 and then noting that I'd designated the next one Chapter 8, a little odd, but just changing it and going on.

Well, this week at the cabin, I found on my laptop a file called Winter Break Chapter 6,7.  I looked at the file, and thought that for sure I'd already incorporated them, but when I read through it, none of it was familiar, and I didn't have the published version to compare it to.

I did have the audiobook version, though, and sure enough, it did not include Chapters 6 or 7 (the narrative just skips ahead, with a couple of paragraphs summing up what happened in the missing section).

Great news.

But this sort of thing happens again and again (and again and again) with me, because, as Big would gladly point out, I don't keep all my stories on Google Docs, where every time I work on one file, it updates on every computer.  And how much extra work has that cost me?  Well, enough to have written a couple more stories, maybe even a couple novels.

But today I'm sitting down and recording those two chapters**, because I just can't let it go.  If it makes the finished products even a little bit better, I guess that's a price I'm willing to pay.

*Oh no, I should be thinking about what I should put in the second Female Protagonist book now.  Do I include a Lara Demming story?  How about one of the Dead & Breakfast tales focusing on a girl/woman?  Maybe put that Princess Leia story in it, since I've never released that other than our podcast?  That story about the girl in college that tells the sorority girls their darkest secrets that I never dared put out because it was mean-spirited?  None of the above???

**After doing it, I found that it involved redoing four chapters, as I now could take out the summary I'd written for one of them, as well as as contradiction this addition created in yet another later chapter.  Such fun.  Except it is kind of fun, to do audiobooks, and nobody MADE me do it; this is all on me.