Setbacks

Last Friday, at 4:49pm.  I remember the time because when your heart stops, you remember stupid shit like that.

I was working on a chapter in Wheeler, book 2, and went to save it.

[Unable to save, please insert a new disk into E:]

[Unable to save, please insert a new disk into E:]

[Unable to map E: Zero Space Available/Zero Space Used. Do you wish to format E:?]

[Do you wish to format E:?]

16 months of work. Gone.

Okay, maybe not entirely gone. But, I am not a smart person and the last time I backed up the stick drive was in July. I had been uploading to my Google Drive so my Alpha readers can preview for me but nothing there had recent edits and none of what I had written beyond Chapter 28 October was on the Drive. Nor my timeline. Or any of my research or character development.

All lost.

At 5:06pm, I felt like someone I loved died. I cried. A lot. The entire drive home. Even tried to recover the data with 3 separate programs on my PC, my co-worker’s and my Mac at home. My darling husband drove me (sobbing) to Geek Squad – they couldn’t do it either.

My Alpha reader, Bob, talked me off the bridge, offering to see if he can manage to recover something from the stick. I can’t get my hopes up, though.

Since then, I’ve slowly faced the fact that I have to rework the chapters on the Google Drive to where I think I had them and try to rewrite the timeline and chapters that are gone.

All that while setting about to recover Version 2.2 of Wheeler, book 1, that was in Word, complete and newly edited, but not yet uploaded to Createspace or KDP.  Of course. (Luckily I can still piece that together.)

It’s all in my head in some shape or form. I just need the time to get it all down again, of which I have precious little. When this all happened, I was in a funk to begin with and I was stuck on how to bridge the gap of where I was, to where I had already drafted the ending chapters. Now, I have to rewrite those ending chapters but, to be honest, I don’t want to do it. I’m tired (and sick, physically).

The good thing is that I’m rereading what I have already written and remembering how much I love the characters. Their story needs to be completed. I just have to buckle down, take a few days off from my full-time job and write, with a pencil and paper.

I tell you all this not for pity, but to be used as an example. Don’t be like me. Be smarter. Back up your shit every week or put it on the Cloud.