Friday Jan 11,2013 will forever be a day when my heart nearly stopped. That was the day my computer lost my novel of 20k.  I am part of a group of writers who are striving to write every day for the year 2013. It could be a paragraph, a page or even more. It does not matter so long that you write.

Some of us have made a personal word count to try to achieve on a daily basis. Well early Saturday I had accomplished my word count, saved the document and moved on with my life. I did not pay much attention to my computer as I primarily worked offline.  I had started to make a list of all my short stories and books and placed them in a chart plus in a folder so I had ready access to them. When I looked for the book that I had been working on just that morning I could not find the file. It was not on the desk top, documents, temporary files or the trash bin.

Panic did fill me as I looked at each folder one by one in case I had misfiled. No cigar. I had just done a back up of my computer the day before so there was that. Until I plugged it in and the computer would not could not open it up. My heart was falling fast at this point as it beat faster in its descent.  I saw three files on my desktop that had the name of my book. I opened each one up. One had a page count of 24, the other 32 and the last one 41. My page count that morning had been 80. Shit shit shit

The tears started to flow as the realization that it might be gone. Calling my husband up I asked for advice, he stated he would look at my computer when he got home.  I have always written my writings by pen and paper first, always. In fact the first 10k of this book was written by hand. But I decided to see if I could do it by computer and save the time. Lesson learned, never again. It takes more time but it saves the heart aches  As I stared at the compute screen the tears flowed faster. With that came the anger. I started to fuss and scream and yell at the stupid piss of shit computer that had dared to take my book away from me. How it had nerve as it mock me with files that had half the book as it teased me into a false hope that they were the book I was so desperately looking for.

I sat back in my chair and just sighed softly to myself. I had been so careful with my works. I have three external hard drives that I do back ups on a more than regular basis. I can’t chance on anything happening to my works. I am so careful it borders on paranoia. But yet here I was with a MS of 20k words and it was gone. The lovely part, yes I am being sarcastic, was when I did a file search it first told me no such file existed yet my desk top clearly had three versions of it. Then a few minutes later my computer told me oh yes you do have that file and it is in this spot. Upon going to the location no such file existed. Yes my computer had the upper hand and it knew it.

To Be Continued…