It's A $$%##@# Nightmare #MFRWAuthor

Only one more post in the 2019 challenge. The topic is one I have had quite a bit of experience with over the past few years. When the perfect day becomes a nightmare.

So how to answer the question? I could go waking up to no pain and feeling good, only to have to make an unexpected emergency room run. Or the year when we missed almost every single event we had planned on going to. A craft fair or river walk isn't feasible in continuous, heavy rains. Even if the crafts people are under tents you still have to drive through flooded roads to get there and then dash between them in downpours that soak you to the bone within a few steps. Dashing through thick, wet grass isn't something you do pushing a wheelchair. A 110 degree heat index meant abandoning plans to go to the regional fair. The free admission wasn't worth heat stroke, or worse, for either the person pushing the wheelchair or the elderly woman being pushed. So, personal is out.

That leave professional. You've just had a perfect day of writing. The words flowed smoothly and quickly, so much so that you forget to hit SAVE. Then your computer dies. Words worthy of a dockworker or mercenary from my fantasy novels flow. After the anger, you pray. Then maybe a few more rounds of each. Finally, you gather up the courage to turn the computer back on. Crossing fingers, you click to the word processor program. It offers you the option to restore the last auto-saved version. Only the last couple hundred words was lost. YAY! Or for the paranoid among us, the file being worked on was connected to the internet. A review showed the document wasn't corrupted when the power surge hit, and prayers answered, nothing was lost.

What to me was a major nightmare was the day the Twin Towers fell. Those who follow my posts might remember that at the time I lived in a town with a view of lower Manhattan and that I had several personal connections to the World Trade Center. The perfect part of the day was that the weather was a beautiful autumn day and I had made progress on a local work. The #$%$% part? It was a history of a town that lost several people that day. Another chapter had to be added to the book I was writing on the town's history to reflect their lives. At each event promoting the book in person there was always a reliving of the nightmare, albeit fleetingly, when those looking at the book were warned about that final chapter. Even today there are those to whom references are too painful and I gave the warning so that my work would not serve as a trigger.

Another author had it even worse. Imagine after months of work, you finally typed "The End" to look up and see the news just before the television goes blank. I could just imagine the sad look as the person ripped the paper out of the typewriter, crumbled it up and threw it in the trash. The action is understandable when you're told the storyline of the just finished novel was about an airplane crashing into a skyscraper.

~till next time, be sure to visit the other authors in the challenge.