oh damn

I was just writing the submission tracking details on my new hard copy of revised MS when I discovered revisions that had fallen through the cracks —meaning they were made after 12/22 and before the old laptop was stolen… and I thought I’d caught all of those! Mostly because I’ve been revising poems from The Sheaf (all the crap I’ve been writing since January) and not the MS. 

You know, the MS I just sent to Ahsahta. 

I mean, those revisions weren’t… I guess they weren’t crucial to one’s appreciation of the poem. Well they sort of were. It was more than tweaking of verbs or line breaks. But it was only two poems in a whole MS. 

FUCK.

REALLY????!!!!!!

Every time this happens I have a moment (more than a moment) where I am back standing in front of my desk and it’s like ghosts have miraculously whipped my laptop into another dimension. I’d actually thought I was hallucinating. Like: psychotic break time. Nope, it was really gone. I feel that disorienting, spinning… every time I find something I’ve lost. 

I can’t believe I didn’t check the electronic copy against the hard copy. Ugh. There are just so many pages. But poems, unlike prose, are modular. They go out in small batches to journals. They go out in a huge chunk as the MS. They squirm and worm around and their state is changeable. I thought I had everything up-to-date and good. 

This is going to obsess me now. 

Perhaps there needs to be cake.