I started writing one of my novels two years ago and had a massive delay with writer's block, which I eventually overcame, and you can read about that here. I mentioned in the other post that I'd been a handwritten-first-draft person and once I really got through my block and picked the novel back up I started by transcribing everything I'd written down into my laptop.
And I realized that I was going to have to scrap nearly all of it and start over. It was … just … so … long-winded…
So I tightened up the outline and started drafting anew! And it was going so well, I was really killing it. I got up at 5 every morning and wrote for an hour or two before the kids woke up, and during the baby's nap while the 4 year old was at preschool, and I was taking my laptop to the bookstore where I work and writing on my lunch breaks.
A week later I was over 200 pages in and I took my laptop out of my bag in the break room at work, and it was… oddly warm. Then it took three tries to turn on. And when I got it working and tried to open my file, the entire thing had been converted to ###################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Two-hundred pages of the pound sign.
I gasped so loudly that a contractor who was in the building working on the wiring, a perfect stranger, stopped to ask if I was okay.
"Uh...yeah…" I said, in a very not okay voice.
"You don't look okay," he said hesitantly.
"...No. Um. Do you know anything about computers?"
"I mean," he said, "I'm an IT guy, so…"
I showed him what had happened. He stopped his work and sat down at the break room table and tried to fix it. He tried three or four different things, none of which I understood at all, and nothing fixed it. Trying not to sound as despondent and, honestly, panicky as I felt, I thanked him for trying.
Then I called my husband, who knows more about computers than anyone I know, and he left the kids with my mom and drove to my job immediately, set himself up in the cafe, and tried everything he could think of, also. He could see what the IT guy had tried to do, and said that those were all the first steps he would have taken, too. Then he tried three more times. And he couldn’t get it to work, either.
I had no back up file.
Now I’ve mentioned that I work in a bookstore. And I love my job. I love my coworkers and management and the environment (and my employee discount) and I even like most of the customers. And one of the things I love about this job is that I’d guess that seventy-five percent of my coworkers are also writers. So when my manager saw my face when I ended my lunch break and went back to work and asked what was wrong, I told him I’d just lost something like 70 or 80 thousand words of work on the second draft of my novel. He looked as horrified as I felt, which was a little comforting.
Then I told him that I hadn’t backed it up.
He put his hands to his mouth, eyes wide, and whispered, “Oh, no…”
This was the general reaction from everyone I worked with. Then came the scolding! From everyone I worked with! “Why didn’t you back up your work? Why didn’t you back up your work?”
Because…I don’t know. I’m lazy? Or dumb? Because of my overwhelming hubris? I don’t know why I didn’t back up my work! I started to, though.
Got back on track and finished that novel (which coincidentally I think I’m going to have to rewrite from scratch again someday). It came out better than the other draft was going to be. Then during NaNoWriMo I took a break from that series and knocked out my first attempt at a middle grade novel. Put both of those through their first round of edits and shot them off to beta readers. Then I started the sequel to the book I’d lost most of a finished draft for .And I backed it up....For a while.
But whatever malfunction my laptop had suffered, it didn’t happen again. And I got lazy, or dumb, or full of overwhelming hubris. I started to forget to back it up every day. Then I started to forget to back it up at all.
Then one day at the end of a shift at the bookstore I noticed that my laptop bag seemed...oddly warm.
I yanked my laptop out of the bag tried to turn it on and couldn’t at first. It was the same thing, all over again. I drove home with it out of the bag so that it could cool down, and once I was home I finally got it to start.
And it happened again. My main document for book two.
############################################################################
Whyyyy?
I had been at 81,000 words. I had been set to finish the first draft by January 15th. My last back up file was saved at only 39,o00 words. At least I had a back up file this time. And just like before, my outlines and character sheets and worldbuilding notes were all intact.
It took me just over a week to get back to where I was when I lost the data. And, once again, I think that the scenes that I rewrote are better than the originals, so I’m feeling fairly sanguine about the loss at this point. I’m now a few days away from finishing this draft of book two.
I don’t take my laptop to work on at the bookstore anymore. And I may be superstitiously nervous about 80k word marks for a while.
But you know what just occurred to me?
I forgot to back up my file yesterday.
What is wrong with me.
I’m going right now to back up my work. You should too!