I spent over two hours yesterday trying to find a story that I was convinced I'd started several years ago, got bored with and set aside.
The reason I remembered it at all was that I was sure I'd rediscovered it only a few weeks ago while hunting out some other older stories to re-work for contests. I'd started it as erotica, but thought it would actually work better as noir. At the time I didn't have time to do more than glance at it, but I did take note of a rather memorable first line about someone jumping out of the cake at a birthday party.
I'd already decided it was going to be my first project in the new year, so yesterday afternoon I tried to find it again. I couldn't remember the title, but I looked through all my word processor documents - no sign of it. I went through again, and opened ANY file that I didn't immediately recognise as being something else - still no sign of it. I thought I must have deleted it, so got out my flash drive and my external hard drive with all my saved stuff on, plugged those in and searched both - still no sign of it. I even ran a search on 'cake' on the whole pc, and although it came up with all sorts of weird and wonderful files (how can you have 'cake' in a jpg?), there was STILL no sign of my story.
At that point I began to think I must have dreamed the entire episode - not just finding the story, but ever writing it in the first place. Not good. I was quite worried.
And then, just before I went to bed, I had another go. This time I was looking through old cd's, although I didn't think I'd ever saved it onto one of those, but while ferreting about an old folder caught my eye - the one with all my roughest scribblings of ideas. I hauled it off the shelf, leafed through - and there was the story, all one page of it, handwritten without even a title.
Phew! I'm not going mad after all!! (Well, no more than usual....)
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