Last night, an amazing thing happened.
The novel, "Transitions", that I have been working on swelled to 42,250 words. And I was pleased with it. It was the last chapter before I would take the characters and dump their poor little lives into a blender.
Then the amazing thing happened. The mouse on my laptop started jumping all over the place; I couldn't 'select' ANYthing, couldn't 'refresh' anything, and when I went to my document, I had 41,390 words ... ending right where I'd started writing five hours before. 900 words ... GONE.
GONE.
I was so numbed by shock and disgust that I drank my glass of wine and went to bed. Even forgot to feed Howie, that's how upset I was.
Around 1 am I woke, sat straight upright, and fired up the laptop to see if I was lucky, and that I had only dreamed losing all those words. Nope, not a dream. And the thought of sleep was far from me. I fed the poor hungry How, and gritted my teeth, and began to hammer.
By 4:15 am, the word count was back up to 42,130 or so, and some of the sentences I remembered well enough to use, and I was compulsively hitting 'Save' after every paragraph, even though I had 'saved' the stuff that was lost, too.
By this evening I realized that I just couldn't risk having that happen again, so I spent my stash and bought a new laptop.
It's a pretty thing, but it sure is a pain in the ass getting to know a new machine.
2 comments:
I've had that happen. Makes you feel sick when it all goes poof. I try to remember to back up frequently and send to myself in email. That's saved my bacon once or twice. New laptop. Nummy.
Sick, yes. I jittered and twitched and could hardly sleep all night. When I went back and read the re-written words, they sounded stilted and unnatural. Bleah.
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