I hate it when I lose an idea for a short story. I get mad at myself, chastise myself, but inevitably I’ll do it again at some point.
I’m currently working on compiling my next short story collection. This is going to be some of my more mainstream fiction. I’m omitting the stranger stuff, the horror and science fiction, but there will still be some oddness to some of them. I’m a believer that writers shouldn’t pigeon-hole themselves and should try writing in other genres every now and then.
So I’ve been going through my drafts and unpublished manuscripts to find stories that fit what I have in mind. So far, I’ve found fourteen that will work, but there was one idea, a partial draft I wrote several years ago, that I felt would be a good fit.
And I can’t find it.
I remember the premise and I know I wrote a couple of pages on it trying to get the main narrative outlined, but for the life of me I cannot find it anywhere. I’ve checked all the writing files on my laptop, my cloud storage, old thumb drives…that sucker has apparently turned to dust.
I have no idea what I might have done with it. I’ve looked everywhere I might have saved it. It’s like when a sock goes missing when doing laundry. You know you put it in the washing machine. It’s not stuck to the side or wedged under the agitator. You double-check the dryer and, nope, it’s not in there. So where did it go?
It’s probably hanging out on a beach somewhere with my missing pens and this AWOL story draft.
At least I remember most of it…so it’s back to square one. Time to get back to typing.
RB