The most stressful power outage I ever experienced happened in the mid-80s. I'd just been commissioned to write my first hyperdrama, although no one knew what to call this new form of theater at the time. All I knew was that the play would be performed in the Pittock Mansion, an extraordinary space to write for, and that the narrative would split so scenes would happen simultaneously throughout the mansion (at one point, 8 scenes on 3 floors would be happening at once!). I was calling the project "simultaneous-action theater." The original offer was for me to lead a team of writers in developing this but since the company wanted to open in a year, I convinced the artistic director (Steve Smith) that it would be more efficient to let me write this alone. No committee meetings to slow things down.
It took me a while to get started (see my essay What Is Hypertext?) but once I decided on a plan of attack, I was off and running. To focus on the project, I rented a cabin on Wallowa Lake for a month (at the time, they gave artists an incredible deal -- Joseph had not become artsy-fartsy yet). Man, what a fine month this was! Writing at all hours, boating on the lake for a break, kind and curious lake residents leaving me food and wine at the door ("We have a writer on the lake!" It was a big deal then.).
One afternoon as I was writing, I saw a thunderstorm forming over the lake, dark and menacing. I kept working. In these early PC days, I recall reading that a sudden loss of power could lose what you were working on or even damage your computer -- but I was in the heat of creation and kept working. Thunder and lightning started but I was oblivious to it all. Then pow! a blast of thunder, and I lost all power. My computer shut off, of course -- and that's when it occurred to me that I might have lost my work. I was near the end of my month, and if I damaged my floppy disk I was in trouble (I had a 2-drive Kaypro: programs ran from one disk, data stored on the second, i.e. no hard drive).
It took about three hours for the power to be restored, a very stressful time. I sat at the window, watching the storm, drinking wine, and imagining all kinds of horror if I lost all my work. But when the power returned, nothing had been lost.
The play opened, the most spectacular opening of my career (I wore a white tuxedo and my photo made the society page for the first and only time), an immediate sellout at $100/ticket on opening night, $50 thereafter, unheard of for Portland in those days. Later a Seattle magazine called Chateau de Mort the 2nd most important cultural event in the NW for the year. And I became addicted to hyperdrama.
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