By Jill Williamson
This was not what I’d planned to write about this morning…
I’m having a hard few weeks, that’s for certain. Ever been there? Of course you have! We all have.
I know better than to save my documents. And I’ve lost them before. But I guess I’ve gotten too cozy with the auto-recovery feature in MS Word. Yesterday I worked so hard on my rewrite. I put in a good ten hours on two tough chapters and had written a lovely page toward a third chapter when Word decided to restart. I panicked, of course. I thought, “Oh no! My cute little new scene for that new chapter. I bet it’s gone!”
More than that was gone, my friends. My whole day was gone.
Sadness.
So what do you do? I admit, I cried. I was devastated. I made my poor husband get out of bed and come and pay attention to my loss. This story had been killing me as it was, and I’d been so proud of the work I did yesterday. So, I tried to find a method to recover it. I Googled every-which-way, looking for some secret miracle that would allow me to copy and paste the magical missing text.
Alas, I have not been successful.
So, like Jo March after Amy burned her beloved manuscript, I will start again. And as I work through the scene a second time, my memory will sprout little bits of don’t forgets. “Jill! This is where you mentioned that sculpture!” And, “Don’t forget the part when he talked to that guy!”
Well, here’s hoping that a good night’s sleep has given my brain the fuel to enact one major do over.
If you’ve lost something you worked very hard on, I feel your pain. How about it, writers? Ever lost some beloved pages to the belly of the ravenous computer?