Nine years ago, I was working at a very unfulfilling library job. I had gone from a busy information desk in North Carolina, where I was hopping all the time, going from topic to topic fast enough to satisfy any information junkie (which I am), to a quiet circulation desk in North Dakota that was little more than a glorified Internet cafe with a book decoration. I didn't stay there long, just one year, and I wouldn't have survived that long if there hadn't been a few really awesome people there with me. I only have regular contact still with one of them, and I have a lot to be grateful for where she is concerned. Besides keeping me sane at a job I hated, she has provided several different kinds of inspiration for my writing. One of those was her being one of the few people I know to attempt the NaNoWriMo challenge, and I think the first I know to complete the challenge, writing an entire novel in one month. She did it last year, and since then, I have been spending a lot of time remembering my one attempt. I first learned of it and tried it nine years ago, when we worked together, and together we created a display for the library, trying to convince others to try it too.
I had been having conversations in my head with a character since we lived in North Carolina, with a cranky older lady who had a lot to tell me. When I decided to try NaNoWriMo, she asked me to tell her story, and I happily complied. By that point I knew a lot about her, and felt confident that we could fill the word quota in 30 days. Unfortunately, by that time, she was suffering from dementia, and quickly I realized that the way we tried to tell her story, in first person, was absolutely impossible. The farther along we went, the worse her cognitive functions got, and the end of the story would have been unreadable. So I gave up the challenge, and put her on the back burner. I thought about her a lot over the years, but I haven't given her the time she needs to rework the story. I think now I have the time and the focus, but most of all, thanks to this blog, I have the discipline to write every day.
When we moved to New Mexico, and my younger daughter's friend from California moved in with us as our foster daughter, I gave her my old computer and started using the desktop I have now. I tried to remove all the files I needed off the old CPU, but in the transfer, I missed Fran's story. My foster daughter is more adventurous than I in getting into the guts of a computer, so she completely wiped all my files off the old box and set about completely customizing it for herself. I kept thinking that maybe the story still existed on an external hard drive I used as a backup in California, but this afternoon I finally checked it, and was disappointed to find no trace of her. My only chance to find the details of my old crazy cat lady imaginary friend is to go through all the old spiral notebooks I have in boxes in the garage (someday I will speak of that addiction). Otherwise, to tell her story, I am going to have to start over, from scratch, and see how much she still remembers nine years farther into her dementia. Wish me luck.
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