Tuesday I wrote a blog post called Working Like a Dog. Actually, I wrote TWO.

Just as I finished…the entire post (except for one dog picture) disappeared. I sucked in a huge breath, but quickly calmed myself, figuring I could < back-up a couple pages to the original post. Or at the very least, I’d get a little computer announcement exclaiming that an earlier version of my writing had been happily saved in cyber space.

Nope.

Nada.

Nothin’.

I wasn’t a happy camper.

At this point (I’ve got other stuff to do, people) so I thought about posting the dog picture with a very long and throaty growl underneath it and letting it be an interpretive piece.

But I’d liked the concept, so I decided to suck it up and plow forward, rewriting as best as a could from memory.

And then something weird happened. I wrote a BETTER post.

The topic was the same. It still had almost all the same points, but it was clearly better.

As I scratched the dog’s ears, I couldn’t help but ponder the situation and what I came up with was…

WE HATE TO KILL OUR DARLINGS!!!!

In the small expanse of time that it took to craft a relatively short blog post, I’d gotten attached and invested in how I’d already started to write my piece. (Even if it wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted it to do.) But, the minute I no longer had that original structure of words, it freed me up to take the more fleshed out concept and roll it out like like a hiker’s sleeping bag at the end of a long day.

I don’t recommend losing blog posts. It’s aids in the loss of tooth enamel as you grind in frustration. But maybe–just maybe–sometimes it isn’t such a bad thing to start at the top.

Lesson accepted.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever lost on the computer and had to start over?