A Writer's Tragedy - and Maybe Getting Past It?

So I was going to a little family reunion in Dallas last weekend. I love to work on planes; I love filing my little backpack with tempting projects. For this trip I wanted to ponder my children's book-in-progress, a deliberately old-fashioned book set in a cottage like my cottage, on a street like my street, a street filled with whimsy and wonder. I wasn't sure I liked the direction I had taken the story and wanted the fresh perspective that would come from thinking about it Somewhere Else, like in a Southwest Airlines plane cruising at 35,000 feet. 

Into my backpack went my trusty clipboard-with-the-broken-off clip on which I've written all my books for the past half-century and the fifty pages of handwritten notes, in my teensy-weeny handwriting, which I had scribbled over the last few months in the predawn hours up in my writing nook. 

(Not the actual notes for this book but a sample of what the pages look like)

But my flight was at 6:30 a.m., and I had taken a 3:30 a.m. (!!!) bus from Boulder to the airport, so I was understandably a tiny bit sleepy as the plane took off.

Are you getting a bad feeling yet? A VERY bad feeling?

I didn't realize that I had left that labor of love in the seat pocket in front of me until I reached my destination and went into my backpack to retrieve my computer. Wait - wait - where was my clipboard and my notes? Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, OH MY GOD, NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I filled out the online form for items-left-on-planes although this one hardly fit into any of the categories offered (e.g., it had no serial number!). I got back a form reply from Soutwest that they would look for it and keep me posted. But their next email began with the dreaded word, "Unfortunately..."

They didn't find it. I realized they were never going to find it. If they hadn't found it as soon as they cleaned the plane, they weren't ever going to find it. It had apparently just looked like . . . trash. Oh, sweet little clipboard, companion for over sixty books written over forty years. Oh, months of thought, months of questions to myself, months of tentative answers (none of which I remember now), GONE FOREVER.

Now, this isn't quite as bad as it sounds. I had already written some 60 pages on the book; the handwritten pages of the manuscript were among the items now gone forever, but I HAD typed them up; they were saved in my Dropbox. And I HAD planned to rethink my original vision for my book: maybe this was the universe's way of nudging me - nay, forcing me - to do just that? 

Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, famously left a valise filled with all his story manuscripts - AND THE CARBON COPIES!!!! - on a train while going to buy a bottle of Evian water at a train stop, and it was gone forever when she returned. Hemingway reportedly said - many years later - that it was the best thing that could have happened to him, a catalyst in changing his style to the one that would someday win him the Nobel Prize in Literature. (He also reportedly said it was the reason he divorced Hadley!).

So maybe this is a GOOD THING? But what if it is a message from the universe telling me that my writing career is OVER? That this new book was indeed what it seemed to the cleaning crew on that Southwest flight: trash? And everything I wrote from now on would be trash? My sweetheart David says this isn't a message from the universe at all; it was just an ACCIDENT with no coded message from the Fates.

I'm going to go with the GOOD THING hypothesis. I'll weep and wail some more, then calm myself and get ready for a new vision for this book for the new year. With a new clipboard to go with it.