An Open Apology to the Fans of ‘The View From the Window of My Tiny Stone Cottage’ Story

My stupidity has caused a delay in my story’s sequel

I owe more than a few of you readers of The Narrative Arc an apology. Each of you who asked me when you could expect to read the sequel to my story,

I told you it was in progress and that I would be submitting it for publication in a week or so. I should tell you that I am an abysmally slow writer. I have been for 65 years, and it’s not likely to change now. So when I said it would be in a week or so, you need to know I had already been working on it for three weeks.

In reality, it was almost completed at the time I committed myself to a submission date. I only had to put the final touches on the very important ending.

And that brings me up to today … when those final touches were to be added. Before I tell you the — the — the, well, stupid thing I did which will cause a delay to that submission … allow me to say (my chin drooping and trembling in shame) that it was partly because I was very conscientious in not wanting the sequel to exceed eight or nine minutes in length … and that was the cause of my underlying lapse in — well, shit! call it what it is! — lapse in intelligence.

I literally had only two short paragraphs to go — and damn, but they were promising to be good ones — before I could tack on “The End”. It was 10 AM (keep that time in mind; it’s important!) and I had already put in three hours on it. My stomach was growling because I don’t eat during my initial three hours of writing.

So, it would be the following morning when I’d finish and submit it. There was just one more thing I needed to do today, though, before I could get to my eggs, toast and coffee. I had to make sure my sequel was within my required eight to nine minutes in length. That means it would have to be no more than 2,000 words.

You know the medium process, I’m sure, in determining the word count by highlighting the entire text, then looking at the upper left screen where the number of words would briefly appear. That was within my capabilities. I could do that. And I did. The story was right at 1900 words with two short unwritten paragraphs that needed to be completed tomorrow.

Now, here’s were it gets dicey. All that a thinking individual needed to do was to click his mouse on any white space and the text would be un-highlighted. A lot of white space to choose from. That’s easy enough. Just. click. there.

But somewhere in this food-starved brain … the way to put it back on my drafts bookshelf was to backspace it. So, with the text still highlighted, up to the right corner of my keypad my index finger shot.

*Click*

*Poof*!

I stared at the blank screen. I refused to believe what I saw. I rebooted and went back to “stories” and … of course, my sequel was missing.

But do you think my mental vacancy stopped there? Oh, no, no…. My still-malnourished brain reasoned thus. Okay, it was 10:10 AM when I committed my blunder. If I can figure out how to recover my hard drive memory back to 10:00 AM, the birds would sing and the angels flap their wings.

Well, my friends, the procedure was easy enough. When I finished, I felt like I had entered into an episode of Quantum Leap. It was rather exhilarating. It turned out, though, that I wasn’t able to set the date to Oct. 5, 2023 at 10:00 AM. I had to use the date of the last time the hard drive was updated, so it took me back to Oct. 3, 2023 at 11:40 AM. Disappointing, but at least not all would be lost. I would be able to capture about half of what I had labored over during the last four days.

Except that I couldn’t.

The sequel was no longer on my “Drafts” bookshelf. Medium has no record of it ever being there.

Now it’s back to square one.

Meanwhile … what the recovery procedure on your computer doesn’t warn you about is that you can’t simply return back to where you started. All the little tapable icons, for example, that I have on my task bar: Google, G-mail, Amazon, Medium, and the like, were now dead. They didn’t recognize me as a subscriber. I had to apply for them individually as new accounts.

Time consuming. And each one throws the echo back in my face: “Blockhead! Idiot! Jellybrain! Stuuuuu-pid!

At least you, dear reader, for your time spent, I’m leaving you with two takeaways:

1. You now know that it will be two to three weeks before I can release my sequel. And …
2. You must fight to the death against being dumb! Got that? Fight!

JS

Hey, if you like what you read, won’t you buy me a coffee?