Lost - an Ode to a Missing Manuscript

No, this isn't a post about Lost, the TV show. It's a funeral for the ending of a story that is lost. The last two chapters of Blue Belle of Scotland, a romance / suspense novel I wrote about five years ago, have gone missing, and try as I might, they seem to be permanently gone.

I evidently wrote the chapters on a lap top, because there is no trace of the chapters on the hard drives of either of my two desktops. I probably wrote it on the A drive, a floppy disk, so I could later insert it into either of the desktops and continue writing no matter where I was, and which computer I was writing at.

Why would any sane person have 2 home computers and a desktop?

Midway into writing the book, I married a wonderful man, a pastor, and started the delightful, but crazed existence I'm still living - in two different houses, 45 miles apart. Some nights we sleep in one house, some nights in the other. Some people have one house in cold, snowy Iowa, and one in warm, sunny Arizona. We have two in Iowa, come rain, snow, sleet, or hot, muggy weather.

When we married, Mark had been the pastor of Bethany Lutheran Church and lived in the parsonage in his little town for almost 4 years. I had owned and operated the Blue Belle Inn B&B and Tea House and lived in an adjacent cottage in my little town for over 12 years.

Neither one of us wanted to give up our job or our house, move to the others town, or drive 90 miles round trip every day. Because of the unique natures of our jobs, both of us felt like we needed to be present at our own house - in our own town - at least part of the time, really, most of the time.

And so we hatched the plot - two houses in two towns.

My only requirement was that the beds we slept in be identical, so wherever I was, I would feel like I was sleeping in my own bed.

So, a bit of mattress juggling, and two new memory foam mattresses later, I moved half of my clothes over to the parsonage and made room in an extra closet for some of Mark's clothes at the cottage.  We each bought two sets of deodorant, two toothbrushes, a bunch of extra underwear, and an overnight case for transporting those must-have-at-both-houses-can't afford-to-buy-two things back and forth.

For the most part, the plan has worked amazingly well. My husband, Mark, makes the drive more days than I do. It's not that we prefer the cottage to the parsonage, it's that he is better at long-distance driving, and I work more evenings, checking in guests and serving them dinner. When I do get to spend a few days at the parsonage, away from the B&B, it is a wonderful retreat, a place where I can write all day long, in my nightgown, if I want to.

But things do get confusing after awhile. Anything I've written since we got married is a jumble of chapters edited here, there, and everywhere. I write in the car between houses, when Mark is driving. I start a chapter at one house, on one computer, and finish it on another. I have a system of saving things to a disk, or sending the file I'm working on to the other house as an email attachment, then saving it to the hard drive, renaming the files each time, so in theory, I know which is the most recent version.

But there are those times you leave one house in a hurry, or arrive at the other frenzied, and have to hit the ground running. Obviously, the system is not foolproof or the ending of Blue Belle of Scotland would not be gone.

Why this loss is affecting me so deeply, I don't know. I'm currently reading The Shack by Wm. Paul Young. The main character loses his daughter, his faith, his peace of mind. That's loss. Losing the ending of a book is nothing in comparison. I mean, I'm a writer. I can write it again, can't I? Maybe, by some stroke of genius, it will be even better.

And yet, my loss haunts me. I wrote it so long ago that I honestly can't remember what I wrote. All I know is that is was good stuff, riveting, probably the best thing I've ever written. I agonized over it. I sweated it out. It was hard to write, a new style for me, action-packed, edge of your seat suspense.

It's been so long since I wrote the first part of the book that I feel totally incapable of writing a coherent ending. I barely remember the names of the characters, the twists and turns of the plot. I like my endings to mirror my beginnings. How can I do that when the images are so blurry I can hardly see?

I want it back.

All I can do is accept that it's lost.

Have you ever lost a manuscript, or something you've written?