Coming Back

Oh boy! Things get messy when your computer is stolen. This past week, I've felt like a chicken with her head and feet cut off, spinning around on my ass, trying to figure out which way to go and how to get there. Despite this feeling, however, I have finally begun to catch up with my work. I've been able to salvage most of my writing projects and have quickly recreated lesson plans to get through the last few weeks of the English courses I'm currently teaching. There's still a lot to do, but things are looking far more manageable.

So, now that I've been through this ordeal, I wanted to share with you a few things that have helped me to bounce back quicker from such a loss of information:

1. Dropbox - This is an excellent service, especially for writers, to back up work in a way that is secure. Dropbox saves your writing to the cloud, which means even if you lose your computer and your drives, you still have a saved version of your writing accessible on the web. A Twitter friend of mine suggested it, and to him: Thank you!

2. Rewriting - There are times when I just need to rewrite and never do. I've known this for some time, but it can be a difficult step to take unless forced. Rather than revising a thing to death, which seems easier, sometimes a piece just need to be started over, with new energy and new resolve. Of course, I was forced to do this. I had a really short story that I had been reworking for a few months, and on one of the nights I couldn't sleep over the past week, I decided to just rewrite the thing, and guess what? The kinks came out in an organic sort of way I doubt they ever would have if I found the piece and continued to tinker at it.

3. Appreciation - There's nothing like catastrophe, even a minor one like getting robbed, to remind me how valuable it is to write through the hard stuff. Writing is always there for me, and again it has served as a way that seems far more therapeutic than any counseling I could undergo. The strongest writing comes from a push of emotion, and whether or not this writing is shared, it remains my foundation, my grounding.

The beauty of being a writer is that nothing can stop us from doing what we do. Writers are resilient that way.