Tuesday, April 18, 2006

In the "Zone"

Did you ever sit down with such a mood for writing and you are going along, everything is pouring out with absolute perfection; each line a masterpiece and you are in the "ZONE"? Your mind feels light and free as you type and let all of the creativity pour out. Writing this way is better than chocolate (Ok maybe not, but darn close!) Your mind, hands and whole body are completely in tune with eachother, you drown out the tv or radio that's on in the background. Your masterpiece is an absolute work of perfection. You are all done and you hit 'save' or 'send'..........then IT happens..... your browser decides at that very moment to FREEZE! OF COURSE you didn't SAVE your work up to that point... you were in the ZONE, your mind, completely engulfed in the subject you were writing about.
You quickly hit the backspace key. Nothing. Frantically, you hit it again, you try reloading the page. Nope.... that blank white frozen page sits and stares at you, MOCKING YOU as your mind, hands and mouth start to go crazy. Under your breath or out loud you shout an array of colourful expletives in hopes to SCARE your computer into cooperating. The white screen, sits there, frozen, staring at you. Mocking your very existance. It's fearless, sitting there, cold seemingly laughing at you. You are infuriated. That happy-go-lucky, light and free feeling you had been experiencing only seconds before has turned dark, ugly and IRATE! You feel betrayed by this machine, this evil, *&^(# ^%#*, @&*&^@ %&@(*#& ()#&^^% MACHINE FROM *$##!!!
Try as you might, you can NEVER write what you were writing exactly as you had it. You can try, try, try, but it will never flow the way it had been, it'll never look or sound as good as it did as you were happily typing and minding your own business. You will make a promise to yourself to save every single paragraph as you go along from now on but you won't. When you're in the zone, you are wearing blinders and you can't stop the flow of the words as they flow out of the tips of your fingertips to the keys on the keyboard. I have sworn to myself time after time that I will remember to save as I go along but I never do. My mind is on a one track line from point A to point B and saving derails the flow. Good luck to all you passionate writers out there... computers are rather evil and have a mind of thier own sometimes. Forgetting to save can send you spiraling down into a whirl of foul language and evil moods as your computer quietly denies that final "Send" or "Save" request.........

3 comments:

Elizabeth K. King said...

YES! And since I type for a LIVING and have lost much valuable time and MONEY from this very thing happening, I now type all my work, long posts and e-mails in MS Word first, and have it set to do an automatic save every one minute. This way, even if there is a power failure, when you restart Word it will ask you if you want to reload the document you were working on when Word was shutdown incorrectly. It's saved my butt MANY times. ~Beth

Anonymous said...

Funny, I think we've all experienced the screen of death. I have gotten in the habit of saving everything as a draft as soon as it comes out of my thoughts and onto paper as long as it's flowing right. Then I can always go back to the draft. This happened after many times of losing that perfect paper, e-mail etc and having it go poof into the wild blue yonder. - Jaq

Artful Creations by Tracie said...

I'm sure there isn't a person out there that this hasn't happened to! And, as you said it, when will *I* learn to do a save?! It mostly has happened in emails (thankfully); I would hope I would be more careful when it comes to more important things like a poem I write or, a story I someday may take a hand at!!!