Dinosaurs, Hemingway, and Me

I haven’t written much these past weeks. I’m a little overwhelmed with a “life event” that is KILLING my creativity. I did work on a post for several hours over this 4th of July weekend. When writing is this much of a struggle the work is usually not great- for me at least. But you have to write something every day, or it gets harder to write. It’s like exercise, but I’ve never cried when I missed a workout.

This morning, the post I had worked on all weekend was almost ready to transfer to my blog, when it disappeared. I did something, touched something with my giant thumbs, and one thousand words, each of them at least four syllables, vanished. Yes, I’ve complained about this before, it has happened before, and I never bothered to figure out how to fix it.

You know what. This is exactly what happened to Ernesto in 1921. What’s that? If you read the book “The Paris Wife” you know that Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, lost a bag on a train in Paris. The bag contained the manuscript and every carbon copy of his first novel.

For the kids:
Back in the days before planet earth was struck by a meteor, consigning dinosaurs to eternity as fossils, something called “carbon paper” was placed between blank sheets of paper for the purpose of duplicating whatever was written or typed on the top sheet. If you were to lick carbon paper you would have become sick. Many a wee dinosaur complained of gastrointestinal upset after licking carbon paper.

That is exactly the same thing… what happened to Ernesto happened to me, except my iPhone is the wife, and the train is thin air.

I couldn’t tell you what Hemingway’s lost novel was about, but I can tell you about my lost post… not today. Today, rather than tell you about why I was not feeling patriotic this weekend, in a thousand multisyllabic words, I’ll tell you what I learned as a result of this tragic event.

I learned, too late how to recover work that my asshole iPhone erases, that there is a secret way to retrieve a note you inadvertently delete. If you give your phone a shake, not a hard throw against the wall, a gentle shake, an undo button will appear and like magic, there is your work. If you try several other things before the shake trick it’s too late, which is what happened to me.

There are apps that claim to be retrieval tools, I downloaded one, and after an hour of waiting while my iPhone uploaded into my Theropod, (any Apple product of the suborder Theropoda, comprising carnivorous dinosaurs that had short forelimbs and walked or ran on their hind legs) including my notes, the not erased part was not there. I give up.

Write drunk, edit sober. Shake your phone, use Grammarly.

I am so feeling Ernesto.