December Sweeps - 312

I am in a surprisingly okay mood for what happened to me today.

About a month ago, I had an idea for, not a sequel to "Ten Thousand Coffins," exactly, but a parallel story of what happens on the Outpost the sleeper ship is heading for.  I outlined it pretty well, with dialogue and the basic plot, but never started writing on it.  But the subject matter is near and dear to my heart (inspired, as all stories now seem to be, by something Marshal Latham said on a podcast recently), with a main character isolated and helpless, as a disease begins to winnow down the population.

So I just began from the beginning, and started the story with the main character, who I called Comtech Gregory Clayton having a real-time conversation with the captain on the Dawn Breaks, right before the older man goes to sleep for the last time before the ship reaches the colony.  Captain Gustafson gives him some advice, assuring him that in a year or so, everything is going to be different on Outpost 3.

I like the idea that, in the last year of the ninety-one year journey from Earth to the outpost, all hell breaks loose on the planet.

I wrote the first chapter, introducing the main POV character, establishing what the colony is like (there are four main structures, but only three are occupied), and that he's alone because both of his coworkers called in sick on the same day.

I started the ball rolling when he gets a call from one of those coworkers, and finds out that there's an emergency currently occurring in Module B.  He decides to leave his post and try to help, even though the rules say--

And then, the power went off at the library.

All around me, the people working on computers made various exclamations, and we were forced to wait for the electricity to come back on.  I stood and approached the librarian.  "There's no chance there's a backup that saves all of our work on there, is there?" I asked.

"I'm afraid not," she said, and when the power did come back, fifteen or so seconds later, I contemplated the loss of my work, my time, and a bit of my good humor.

When I logged back in, it said, "You have used 81 minutes of your allotted 120.  You have 29 minutes left."

So, that means that it was well over an hour's writing I lost.  And I did check, just in case Word made some kind of emergency back-up, or miraculously, it had saved to my gmail or something.  But no, nothing, not a single word had survived.

Still counts as writing, though.

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In December: 844

Words Today: 1500
Words In December: 6456

The thing is: a real winner would probably have shaked his fist at the heavens, then sat down and made himself (or herself) write the scene again . . . and then went on to Chapter 2.  And a real winner probably would've used "shaken" instead of "shaked."  Maybe even "shook."

But I didn't do that.

I guess I should go to bed and see if I can't do it better tomorrow.  We'll call a Mulligan, okay?