They basically said I'm screwed and have emphasized all the myriad of reasons why they don't want to pursue options available, namely, seeking various professional help. They don't quite seem to understand just how valuable that flashdrive actually is.

That flashdrive is quite literally my life's work. All my work, across my entire life, stored there. It is quite literally the one possession of mine I value more than my life. If I could take any one thing with me. Literally everything else except one thing gone. The one thing I would take with me would be that flashdrive. Because that Flashdrive is my life. Both literally and metaphorically.

That flashdrive is a record of my existence. It is a record of my accomplishments, such as they may be. It is a record of what little I have to claim as my life's work. Of course the question comes up of why no backup. The answer to that can be found in knowing that the flashdrive is the backup, to other sources which have since vanished. My original flashdrive. My original laptop. Numerous various long-dead and/or long-wiped desktops. Accumulated over the years to be stored in a single location. And said single location switched eventually from being the backup to being the primary when new original content started being put on it...namely, a combination of schoolwork and my novel.

I don't want to restart all of that. That's literally impossible. I can't recreate over ten years of my life.
I want to recover that.
I don't want to replace the time.
I want to restore it.

And I've tried communicating this to my parents but they simply don't speak me that well since they don't seem to understand this.

They also don't know just how much I can't do anything without that flashdrive.
In theory I'd be able to restart my novel.
What'd be lost is the third draft (most recent work), and the second draft take four (second most recent), and probably also the original.
So I'd lose the most recent content which didn't get far, the second-most-recent content which got reasonably far but not all the way, and the original content which did get there, but it's something I can overcome...in theory.
Because in theory I could see it as a forced fresh start, where the entirety of the novel was thrown out and I'd start over literally from scratch rather than just metaphorically.

...But in practice. There's a combination of autistic inertia, bipolar disorder depression, and just...something else I don't have a word for. But that thing. That thing which when combined with the other two. Makes it so that I just. Can't do anything real-life related. I can't do job stuff. I can't do writing stuff. Heck even art stuff might be difficult.

The best way to describe it is...
...I feel like a part of me has died.
And with that part of me dead.
I can't call upon it.
I can't use the stuff which died.

And yes. Parts of me can be tied to objects, such that the removal of said object from my life can kill those parts. Is that a me-quirk or a quirk of something else, who knows, but I have it all the same. And with it...I can't go on without the flashdrive. Yet they don't understand this.

I'm still alive, but half of me--the half of me I actually cared about--just...died. It's like I lost part of my soul. I can't recover from that. No amount of time. No amount of healing. No reassurance. No offers. No attempts to move on. There's nothing about it which could make me okay, which could make me alright...except for me to get the flashdrive back and working.

Granted, it's not necessarily the flashdrive itself so much as the contents within.
I do like the flashdrive itself mind you (it's a very nice flashdrive), but the flashdrive itself is just a shell, a vessel. It's the contents within which contain the spirit, the fruits of my labor. And I need them back.

I'm not going to even apologize for the language.
Yes.
THAT out of character for me.
I know, for those who're used to me from mafia, it's not all out of place to see me writing f-bombs left and right but they don't really realize just how unnatural that word is for me to naturally utter.

...And yet.

...Uttering it is just about the one and only word I can think of to describe things.
Because.

My flashdrive broke.

This being.
The flashdrive my novel is stored on.
With no current backup.
All my work on there for years.
On that flashdrive.
With no backup.
Just. broke.

​I think a curse word is just about the only possible description for that.

So some background: as a child, I was afraid of basically everything. But in particular, a big fear of mine was the dark. There's a huge story, a full proper ramble on this although my words sadly fail me. But basically, I had that fear as a child. I finally overcame the fear by just standing out in the darkness, letting it wash through me. (This is such an epic moment and I am utterly failing to convey it with words now, I'll see if I can retell the story properly when I can more think.)

But today...for the first time in ten or so years...I felt a fear when I stepped outside into the dark. I recognized it instantly. It was fear. Fear of the dark. I was actually afraid of something so silly, so irrational. There's nothing scary in there. I know that. Yet every step of the way, even as I had the door closed, I was on the verge of panic because of the dark.

I found it honestly a bit disconcerting. My lack of ridiculous fears like that has been a bit of a point of pride on my part. Yet for some reason, randomly, today it was altogether gone. I feel like I have more to say on the subject, but it'll have to wait until a future time.

Wherein prior to the beginning of it I was introduced to the magic known as the bacon maple bar. It is something absolutely delicious and absolutely worth it. After that, during the staff meeting, someone brought in a baby who was something like ten days old or so. (Thereabouts.) Everyone in the room basically went various combinations of "awwww" and "BABY!" when they saw this.

...Including me, mind you. Not vocally. But the look I gave probably said it all. Babies are awesome. They do have the slight drawback of all the bad stuff that they do, but seeing them I just get overwhelmingly filled with life and love and a reminder of everything which I live for.

The meeting was a bit shorter than I expected, and I did alright in it, but I can't share the particulars of our meetings, so this is about all I have for today.
...Like, literally, everything. I woke up. I prepared to go to the staff meeting. I came home from the staff meeting. I did spend some precursory time on mafia stuff, but not nearly as much as I should be, but given that I work tomorrow morning (I go straight from the staff meeting tonight to working tomorrow morning), I knew I couldn't do as much as I'd prefer.

​Ah well. Hopefully tomorrow I can do what I want.

...By which, I really mean today thanks to writing this past midnight. I also had family night tonight. But other than that and how desperately I need sleep...I can't really think of much to talk about. Sometimes that happens, unfortunately.

My dog is wearing the cone of shame for five days, and he's got one eye sewn shut due to stitches (he had an eye infection). He got something like twelve teeth pulled and in general is an absolutely miserable dog. (He was in really, really bad condition. We knew he was in bad condition, but we couldn't arrange for care until recently.) And a miserable dog means...

...Yyyyyep.
We're gonna be dealing with nonstop constant whining.
But at least on the bright side...these are things which needed to be done to improve his long-term health: both his quality of life and his lifespan should be higher thanks to these things, once he heals, because with him healed, he'll no longer have the issues that he had.

There's one novel in particular that I want to keep writing on, that being the one I was working on before Heroes of Gistou. The problem there is. My notes are literally the absolute worst. Scattered across at least five different electronic locations in addition to the various, numerous paper locations. Dozens upon dozens of contradictory pages of information. Did I say dozens? I mean hundreds.

Some stuff explicitly no longer canon. Other stuff which I no longer even know if it's canon or not. Stuff so sloppily and messily done I have no reference point for whether it's useful to note or not. A complete lack of organization, consistency, or generally any coherency.

Keep in mind this novel dates back to 2009. I've been writing it for 8 years now. And I've revised it over that time so many times. And some notes refer to some revisions, others to other revisions, and it's just a whole chronological mess. So many conflicting ideas. Plot-wise. Character-wise. Setting-wise. Everything is just the biggest mess possible. And I need to sift through it all, manually, step by little baby step. In order to tell what to do with it.

What I want is for my notes to have a strict organization. Concepts, background, novel history, trivia and the like in one section. Worldbuilding in another. Backstories (which're intimately tied to the worldbuilding in that several key characters have ancestral ties to those that effectively built the world) separate from that. A section detailing every character, every facet about them. A section outlining the plot start to finish. Plus a section for orphaned material: little tidbits here and there which may or may not be things I can (re-)add to the novel.

It's so much work.
And it's so disorganized.
So chaotic.
So disjointed.

I don't know if my brain can actually make the connections it needs to in order to pull this off.
Yet I know that if I don't do this, I can't pull it off.

​I suck.

I don't know how to start writing again.
But I want to start writing again.
This comes from reading Reader's Digest's genius issue. A number of articles there have encouraged that side of me, that more creative side rather than more...well, lackluster gaming side. In particular, what caught my attention and made me blog was reading the back-to-back articles about Confessions of a Word Nerd (in that I empathize there quite a lot and have many of the same peculiarities) combined with the books-getting-dumber...

...And also. Critically. With its formula, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test. (Incidentally this would be a great test to use for me when writing my posts in mafia games to test how easy they are to understand. It might actually offer an explanation for why a higher-rate of posting with one-liners is so "easy", in that users of the style are usually harder to lynch. The explanation being their posts are impossible to not-get, whereas longer posts are possible to not-get.)

Apparently the formula comes out to be 0.39(total words/total sentences) + 11.8(total syllables/total words) - 15.59. I imagine the formula has all sorts of flaws. The article used it as a golden standard to measure how things have progressively been getting "dumber". When there are any numerous alternative explanations available. The formula isn't accurate, the formula is a poor metric to measure off of even if it IS accurate, a shift in society has rendered the formula once-accurate to be obsolete, and so on and so forth and whatnot.

...But that's not my point. My point is...I just feel invigorated by the articles. I've always thought, "I could do better". With Twilight, I thought "I could do better". So I invented a whole series of trashy romance novels for me to write. (And yes I do say trashy because no, they aren't really actually better.) With the Inheritance Cycle, I thought "I could do better". I haven't even read Game of Thrones and yet I've thought I could do better than that.

Heck, call it arrogance all you'd like, call it an ego, but when it comes to titans of the industry like Steven King and J.K. Rowling. I've thought, "I can beat that". People have told me throughout my writing career at every step of the way. "This is good." That I pick up on things others miss. That I have a way with words. That I write spectacularly. And, admittedly. To be fair. Most of these people have been close to me.

So yes I know they could be exaggerating for my sake. Yes I'm quite aware they could be biased and think me better than I actually am. But...again, call it arrogance all you want. Yet...I don't think they're wrong. I DO think I'm that. damn. good. (Pardon the language.)

I have the talent. I have the skill. I have the ability. I...I honestly doubt my capability. Because I've had hundreds of attempts and no successes. How could I succeed especially when even knowing about my bipolar disorder I still cave in to it at ALMOST every turn? I'm motivated now but that's almost assuredly my manic half kicked into high gear. What happens when that turns to depression and yes it inevitably will? What happens when I get writers' block? What happens when I hit the revision wall where I want to rewrite everything?

I don't have an answer for all of that. Which is why I have all these doubts about my ability to actually follow through on this. I've wanted to so many times. I've tried to, so many times. I've failed. So. many. times. I mean, granted. NaNoWriMo starts less than a week from now. That's a perfect time to begin, even if I cheat to get my goal. (The goal of NaNoWriMo isn't to get the word count, it's to get the novel written. So prewritten content, by my definition, is fine.)

But will that be enough?

​I can't say.

This year, though...I want to go back to writing the novel I was writing before. It would remain mostly the same, but there's a few extra notes I want to make/use.
I...really don't think I can succeed.
But I want​ to.

It was at the very end of class and it was very brief. I managed to get away with "my alarm didn't go off" which is strictly speaking not a lie (it can't go off if it was never set to go off), and that I was ticked when I found out. I really was ticked at myself when I realized it, albeit with different timing than implied. So it's okay.

But this one will be a far less important one, albeit one I am just as equally dreading:
...Explaining to my tae kwon do instructor why I missed the test on Saturday. I don't want to lie, but at the same time. I really don't want to admit that the reason was sheer utter incompetence on my part by virtue of me having forgotten, more or less.

There's just no dignity in it and it's shameful. I said I would be there. It was important for me to be there. This is an actively-attending student, one of our more elite ones, doing a higher-ranked belt test. A belt test where thank god I wasn't required to be on the panel (that would make it ten times worse), by only by virtue of it being so high ranked that it's something you want that much higher ranked person to be on the panel for.

I just feel all kinds of terrible about missing it and I just don't really want to admit that I wasn't there because it's one of those things where I absolutely should have been there for...yet I wasn't. And I wasn't there not because of some valid reason like a prior obligation. I wasn't there because I was a moron.

Ah well.

​I'll survive, albeit with a great amount of guilt.