While I was watching a program on the Smithsonian Channel about this guy named Shockley (of course I forget his first name) I realized that my days of genius are gone.
Whoever this guy started out to be, he always thought, even as a young child, that he would win the Nobel Prize for something. In the few minutes I watched the show, I learned that he got it for inventing along with the two more famous guys, the transistor. We all know how important those things are. In the background, mysterious and mystical formulas and mathematical equations floated. They meant nothing to me. They never will. But he is responsible for starting what is known as Silicon Valley and all the assorted scientific wonders that has produced. He went around recruiting the best and the brightest men (humph) and got them to work together...inventing stuff.
The show didn't say he invented anything after the transistor, though. Maybe he just sat around picking people out for their genius and let them do all the work. I don't know.
Yesterday I saw one of my favorite Alien shows about Albert Einstein's brain. Really. And it went on and on about how he must have been visited by aliens when he went into one of his deep thought things. He used to just sit quietly and think and all these cool things that nobody else can understand came to him.
Trance-like. Far viewing. Self-hypnosis. Daydreaming? Whatever it was he did, he came up with that totally incomprehensible stuff about bending space and finding wormholes in which to travel to far off stars and not age as much as the people you left behind.
Now, I think that's pretty much bullshit, but I'm not a genius in that way. Besides, nobody has exactly proven that this will happen as they haven't been gone far enough away at the speed of light to prove it. It's a THEORY and we are supposed to accept it as fact.
Well, I call shenanigans!
If I sit real still and think inside my brain, I come up with ideas for stories. There are some people in this world who cannot picture things in their minds unless they see a photo or something in National Geographic...and then they have to strain to come up with a description of what they've seen. I imagine these people do not become writers. For all their genius, for all they think of space bending and mass equaling such and such...I think I'd rather have the brain I have.
Even if it is starting to forget more than you'll ever know.
Okay, it wasn't really that bad, but...somebody asked me how many words on the WWII story I had in the can. I decided I would print out all the various disconnected scenes along with the six chapters that are actually the beginning of the story and count the words. Easy, right?
So, I went looking for the scenes and found three pivotal scenes, nearly whole chapters, missing. They were just not where I thought I put them. I could remember what happened but not how, the words were not there for me to recapture, but the ideas were. I panicked. I looked through my WORD files. Nada. Karyn found something by typing in key words in that little file folder thing on the bottom of the page here for which I was grateful, but I distinctly remembered these two missing scenes that I knew I had written and were apparently gone forever.
I tried her trick, putting several words that were distinct to these passages into the little space atop the folder looking thing on the bottom of the screen. Nothing happened.
I went through 819 SENT emails because I knew I had written these passages recently enough and was negligent on deleting sent stuff. Nope. Not there.
I wrote to the very friends I sent these sections to, hoping beyond hope that they had somehow saved these bits. Nope, though they remembered what I had written.
I read through those SENT folders again.
I prayed.
I checked my husband's WORD file on his laptop...success! I found one thing I had written last summer and neglected to put into My WORD file. That was good, but still, there were two whole big scenes missing. Memorable, but not word for word repeatable.
Last resort, today, I started looking through my entire documents file. I found two files with BACKUPWIDOWSWALK on them...surely something I had transferred to gmail then into my files somewhere.
I opened the first and there was the first segment I was looking for.
Opened the second and, bingo! The last missing piece was in there.
So, I am printing out all the words I have written, wherever I may find them, just to see how many words I have regarding this lovely story. My heart is happy. Now I just have to highlight and print all I have.
I can do that.
