Positive from a Negative

I have been working on a book series (which I hope to publish one day) for about three years now. I have completely finished writing the first book and had started on the second. All was going well up until about six months ago, when I suddenly lost my plot and became angry with one of my characters. The second book was not turning out as well as I had wanted it to and my main character wasn't the strong heroine that I had desired for her to be. Because of this, I decided I needed to take a break from the story.

It has been approximately six months since I have worked on the series...and I suddenly have inspiration to write on it again. I had a dream about my main character that has me wanting to write about her and the chaotic world she lives in. However, I opened my documents two days ago and just about cried when I found that every thing I had written for the second book of the series had mysteriously disappeared...outside of the first four pages.

Needless to say, I wasn't too thrilled about the loss of over sixty pages of a story that I had thrown almost all of my spare time into for nearly two and half years. Yet, after some thought I realized that I wasn't actually mad that I lost those sixty pages. I was only mad that I lost three of the scenes in them. Three scenes...that's approximately fifteen to twenty pages...I was mad because I lost 15-20 pages out of 60+.     

After realizing that, I ended up having a conversation with my sister. My sister, just so you know, is the first person I run all of my story ideas by. She's the first person to read them, as well as the first person to make comments. This is because she'll flat out tell me if a story sucks or not. I know I can trust her to give me honest feedback...and give me honest feedback is what she did when I called her to complain about my missing pages. Her words to me? "This could be a good thing, you know. Remember how we said that you needed to change the time in the story because not everything that was happening could take place in a week? Remember how you said you wanted to make _________'s DID more obvious? Didn't you want to change ________'s hair too? And _______? I thought you didn't like how she was turning out. Now you can make all those changes." 

My sister was right. There were more things I had wanted to change about the book than keep. So, I've decided to turn this negative into a positive. I've changed my thinking from, "Crap! I just lost sixty pages worth of story," to, "Hey! Now I can write the story how it's supposed to be written." 

I'm actually glad that I lost those pages now. I haven't started rewriting the book yet, but I'm planning to soon. I think I'm going to read the first one before I do though, that way I can get back into the mindset of my characters who have been dormant for six months. 

The moral of this story? Don't let bad things get you down, because some times bad things happen for good reasons :)