The Lost Chapter

I wrote the first actual narrative sentences for Norton the Third around 1990. My daughter Sarah was performing in the opening ("party") scene of Peninsula Ballet Theatre's Nutcracker. I had to drive her to rehearsals every Saturday morning, and was commanded by the rather draconian director of the production to remain in the rather cramped studio waiting room, sitting on a rather lumpy sofa.

Sarah was in this production for four years, working her way up from "child" to "toy soldier", but I know this would have been in her first year, because in the remaining years, I was also in the production, cast as Godfather Drosselmier, thus admitted to the inner sanctum, the rehearsal hall. This pretty much pegs the year as 1990.

One such Saturday that first year, stuck in the ballet company waiting room for nearly three hours, I cracked open my new laptop computer to do some work. Laptops were so primitive in those days that I couldn't actually debug complex software on mine, but my company provided it so I could write documentation and sales literature (see? I've been a fiction writer all my life!).

Bored with the work project, I decided to invest my time in a writer's exercise -- open a blank file, pick a topic, and write without stopping or correcting for a half hour. Don't let that evil internal editor take over! The subject I chose was an incident in 1863, bringing to life an moment in history I had been ruminating about for decades. I found that writing fiction was really fun, and quite rewarding. You could say I was hooked on the idea of writing a novel starting with that exercise.

The result of this exercise, and some follow-on efforts in coming days and weeks, was a ten-page chapter that I expected would kick off a full novel. It introduced a really enjoyable, very nasty character, and gave him a really bad attitude he would retain though the long, chaotic life I had imagined for him.

I sandwiched little efforts on this incident into my work and child-raising life for the next few months, but never quite managed to get the file off the laptop (via a floppy disk) and into some more permanent storage. You can see where this is going, of course: later that year, the laptop died an ugly, permanent death, taking with it my first successful fiction writing effort. I was so wrapped up in other things, that I didn't even notice it was gone for several more months.

I've made occasional attempts to re-create this chapter over time, but the damn thing stubbornly refuses to come back to life.

About that same time, we lost a cat, Sarah's beloved Oliver, at our Lake Tahoe cabin. One night, he just didn't come home after his regular evening prowl. Ever since, as I drive around one particular corner on our way in to that neighborhood, I imagine I look up and see Oliver squatting there, waiting for us, playing with his collection of dead birds.

Every once in a while, also, I search through the archives from old machines on my current computer, wondering if just maybe I'd overlooked a copy of that chapter, and it's waiting patiently there for me to resurrect it.

But, of course, it's not.