THE BOOK WAS FINISHED WHEN IT BROKE
By Brex
I had Chime finished.
Not nearly finished.
Finished.
Everyone was where they belonged. The threads were tied. The pieces that had been fighting me for months had finally stopped fighting.
I remember sitting there looking at it and thinking:
There you are. You are going to change the world.
Then my computer died.
They said lightning.
Maybe.
The screen cracked. The hard drive survived, apparently, but most of the book is still sitting inside it like a body behind locked glass. So far, no one has been able to get it out.
Which left me with fragments, older drafts, and my junior assistant, Laura Brigger.
Laura remembered quite a bit.
I remembered quite a bit.
Unfortunately, we did not remember the same quite a bit.
So we rebuilt it.
And where neither of us could remember what had originally happened, Laura filled the holes with perfectly respectable story things.
People crossed rooms.
Someone explained something that probably needed explaining.
Characters behaved in reasonable ways.
Scenes connected to other scenes.
It was dreadful.
Not badly written.
That would have been easier.
It simply wasn’t Glitch.
By then I was exhausted, Laura was exhausted, and neither one of us could point to the missing thing because neither one of us could remember exactly what had been there.
We only knew something had.
That is a peculiar kind of knowing.
You can forget a sentence and still know the replacement is lying.
You can forget the path and know perfectly well you are standing on the wrong road.
So now I am going back through Glitch.
Not looking for what I remember.
Looking for the places where I don’t.
Those may be the most important parts.
And for the record—
I still don’t think it was lightning.
— Brex
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