Our house lost power twice yesterday, once in the afternoon and once in the evening. I was working on a couple of book reviews at the time. Aware that an abrupt power outage was possible, I was diligently saving my document every few minutes. When the power cut out at 6:15 I lost no more than five minutes worth of polishing…which took about 20 minutes to recreate this morning.
After the power went out, I went downstairs to read by the dying light of the day. I started out on the couch with a window over my shoulder and ended up leaning into the sliding glass window on our back deck before giving up completely. We decided to walk a mile to a nearby restaurant that had power. Even at 7:00 it was way too hot outside—my car thermometer registered 104 degrees when I started it up at 5:00 and had dropped to 101 by the time I got home.
The outage was sporadic. Most of the streets we passed had power. We got back to the house around 8:40 and from two blocks away we could see the black hole of darkness surrounding our block. One neighbor has a generator—I was hoping the power would come back on soon or else there would be no sleeping with that thing chugging away over the back fence. Five minutes after we got back inside, the lights and A/C came back on. Though the house felt like it was sweltering hot, the temperature was only 80 degrees, two degrees above our normal set point.
I set my cell phone alarm as a backup, but the power didn’t go out again before my morning writing session.
I sent the first 200 pages of my 350 page novel back to my agent yesterday to await his comments. Most of it he’s read already, but I made some revisions based on his feedback to one section then continued on with rewrites on my own. My hope is to get a manuscript ready to shop around by mid-November.
