Technology disasters and a cacao and strawberry clafoutis to put my mind away

Last week was not a good week. I mean, I just have to turn on the TV and watch the news to feel like crying my eyes out, really, and just thinking about what the world is coming to, what people are coming to, makes me depressed as hell. So I do try not to linger too much on that, call me shallow and egocentric all you want to, I just call it keeping my sanity. Or at least, trying to. It's not always possible. On top of all of my personal shit - most of it in my head and without the slightest importance in the big scheme of things - to find myself unable to sleep as my mind revisits sceneries of horror that are simply too real and too close to home for comfort, is enough to have me feeling quite down, and I must strive to get out of that mood.

It all came down to my having a sort of a meltdown last Friday, where I was either gonna loose it and smash my laptop to pieces, bawl my eyes out in a fit of hysterics, or simply keep my head, take a deep breath and hope for the best. I chose the last one, mostly because I cannot afford a new laptop right now - and I so love the one I have! - and because I have my son with me and did not want him to see his mom completely losing it like a mad woman! I kept my cool outside, but I was burning from the inside and my head just kept going over the same old 'what's it all worth?' question. Why do I even bother, I kept thinking.

The truth is, what happened isn't a huuuuuuge deal, it's not a biiiiiiiiig thing, but to me it kind of is. See, I was working on the second part of my vampire series when I realised I had bundled up some files' names. I mean, this book has a lot of research that I had to do, just so I am not writing up stuff that simply is impossible to have happened, say in the French Antilles during the 1700's. Or mixing up Vodoun with Louisiana Voodoo, you know? So I had a file with a few infos and research on certain matters. And another one with a complete genealogy of certain families that are featured in the story. And the file where I was actually writing the story. I think you can see where this one is going...

Last Friday I noticed I had gotten the file names wrong, and had named the file where I had the research with the name meant for the file where I was actually writing my novel. Seems like something easy to sort, right? Yep, I thought so too. I simply changed the files' names! And when I did it, I have no bloody idea what actually went wrong but... the file with the research and the infos I needed was gone, completely gone! And on my novel, all the corrections I had done were missing and about fifty pages were also gone! I couldn't understand what had happened, it was like all my latest work had simply vanished into thin air. Hours of work from the past three weeks were simply gone, and I felt like crying.

But then I remembered I always back up on an external disk, so I went for it immediately, hoping against hope - because doom is my middle name! - that I would still have at least the file where I was writing the novel complete and stashed away there. Nope. Gone. Vanished. Lost forever. Because I had been saving a file under the novel's name that did not contain the novel, it actually contained a complete genealogy which I wasn't working on because it was done. I was writing my novel, yes, I was backing it up, alright, but I was doing it wrong because I had gotten the names of the files mixed up! So to cut a long story short, my research is gone and that will set me back a couple of days more, parts of the story are lost and I will have to go through it again and revise and edit what I had already worked on and still try to remember what I had written last week.

It ruined my Friday, it did. I know it ain't much of a big deal, but there was a lot of work put into it, and I actually just wanted to give up on the whole thing and let it go and not touch that novel again anytime soon. It passed, as things usually do, and I kept thinking to myslef that there was nothing to it, I would simply need to go and re-write, and research some more and maybe I would come across info I hadn't before, and maybe the new chapters would even be better than the ones I had lost. So now I am back at it - well, trying to! - in the midst of taking my delightful son to the beach and in the midst of cooking and editing and shooting and styling for this blog. I'm taking it easy and trying not to stress about it, and I am actually excited for writing those chapters again! As excited as I was for this cacao and strawberry clafoutis I baked a couple of weeks ago.

It's the kind of recipe you spruce up in a hurry if you have suprise guests or are in the mood for something sweet, it's as simple as this:

• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup of flour with bran
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup cacao
• 1 + 1/4 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• zest of one lemon
• pinch of salt
• 1 cup strawberrys, hulled and roughly sliced

Turn on your oven at 180º. Place all the ingredients minues the strawberries inside a bowl and give it a good mix, until everything is combined. Grease an oven dish with butter and scatter the strawberried around. Cover them with the batter and let it bake for one hour. You can use any kind of berry on this one, I guess it will taste as amazing with a mix of red berries as it does with the strawberries. Hope you enjoy it, should you need chocolate as a little pick me up, I know I did, this past week!!