How Losing My Blog Helped Me Build a Better Universe
For the past several weeks, I've been building the world of 13 Screams.
Like many creative projects, it started with excitement.
A lot of excitement.
I was creating pages for Sesame, The Mark, KSME 13 News, Oklaweed, Connie's Fund, character profiles, and future story ideas. Every time I had a new idea, I immediately started building.
Then I made a mistake.
While creating memorial content for my Grandma Connie page, I accidentally replaced the content on my Behind the Screams blog. After reaching out to SITE123 support, I learned that the original blog content could not be recovered.
At first, I was frustrated.
I had spent time writing and publishing those articles, and seeing them disappear felt like a major setback.
Then something unexpected happened.
I remembered that I had saved most of the content in Microsoft Word.
The stories weren't gone.
The website copies were gone.
The stories survived.
That realization changed my perspective completely.
As it turned out, the real problem wasn't losing content.
The real problem was my process.
I had been so excited about building the website that I skipped something I already knew was important: organization.
Ironically, that same week I had completed coursework involving project organization and documentation. I knew better. I just let my excitement get ahead of my workflow.
The experience forced me to stop and build a proper archive.
Now every project has a home.
Behind the Screams
Sesame
KSME 13 News
The Mark
Character Profiles
Connie's Fund
Grandma Connie Memorial
Toyworks
Every article exists in my archive first.
Only then does it get published.
Looking back, losing those posts wasn't the disaster I thought it was.
In fact, it may have been one of the best things that happened to the project.
It forced me to stop thinking like someone building a website and start thinking like someone building a universe.
The website is important.
The stories are more important.
And as long as the stories are preserved, everything else can be rebuilt.
Sometimes the best lessons come from mistakes.
Sometimes the best organization comes from losing something.
And sometimes a setback turns out to be a happy accident.
— Christopher Criss