In one of those writer's calamities you hear about on the news once in a while when somewhat loses a laptop or deletes a major projects work from a computer, I had an anxious hour earlier today.
I thought I had corrupted the file of my 'novel' and didn't know if I could recover it. But by some stroke of geek technical good fortune, it looks like I have saved it. It was the first 8500 words but, honestly, if I had lost them, I wasn't going to write them again.
But there is no need to worry. When I say 'my novel', this is not something that is likely to be unleashed on the world. I know a fair number of people, many of them with much less literary presumption than me, who have written novels or novellas and the ones I've read haven't been bad at all. I have moved over the years from wishing I could produce one myself to a general feeling of resignation that I can't invest the time and effort in something that won't be any good. A number of unreasonably optimistic starts have been abandoned very quickly. I was like an adventurer setting out to cross the Atlantic on a plank of wood.
But all I want to do is be able to say I've got one and done it. It won't matter if it's no good and I won't have to revise it to make it coherent. Further encouragement came from a website that put the definition of 'novel' down to something consisting of 40 thousand words rather than the 50 I thought were required.
And so I am now already a quarter of the way there in not many weeks of adding 500 or 1000 when I feel I can. It is called Midtagspause, which is the German for 'lunchbreak' and centres on the office lives of two smartarses, a diatribe against the way large organisations are run, an unrequited love and the writing of the novel itself.
It is nowhere near as good as I'd like it to be, in fact it is rubbish, but I never let that stop me doing anything I wanted to do before.