One Disaster – another – another –

Shrug. Well, that’s how it seems.

Missed a few minor errors in the story – went into the folder to fix the docs  (there are three versions, one for each of the platforms: mobi, epub, and cs) and guess what? Damaged. Beyond repair.

Ran a hardware test.

Failure in hard-drive.

What? Did I back-up? Of course, always do? When? How long ago? Did I do it after the all-night slog?

Check?

No.

Crap.

All that hot and cold joy and fear and trepidation of finally getting it out there is now irrelevant.

I don’t have a working copy of the ms.

Surely there’s one somewhere. What about the other places I send things to? The beta readers? Check the out-box of the online mail (‘cos the desktop mail icon is gone and so are all the folders for it, let alone files and …).

One copy. One that’s two weeks old. Without all the revisions. But I have the online docs, and I can download and compare and …

That’s when it hit. The pain of it all. The stupidity of failing to do what I always insist others do – backup every day! Take it to an off-computer backup location. Every day.

I sat there yesterday, considering ways to try to save what was there, what I was working on over the last two weeks with such hectic pace that I didn’t do what should be done.

Sweats, shivers, shitty liver moments. Storm and stamp and scream. Idiota!

With no one to blame but myself.

So, now that I need a new hard-drive, and I have to use another person’s composter (whoops, Freudian), and I’ve rediscovered why I like certain keyboards, and my own chair, and my own space and …..

Aaarrrrrgggggghhhhh!

When I get a new guts for my computer, and when it gets all the programs and placements and ….

That’s when I’ll be back. A few days, maybe, and in the meantime, I go back to the old-fashioned way of pencil and paper (pencil can be ‘amended’) to try to recall where I was up to with things, and write a schedule, and maybe a scene outline or two – anything to take my mind off my reliance on these silly bloody machines!

Ciao!

Oh, and no picture – got none of those left now, except on the backup drive that’s stored away from my work area – locked up safe and sound and I have to get in the car and drive all that way to get it. That’s why the two weeks. I need a new plan, a new strategy – and not a cloud! [you can ask me why another day].

I also seem to need a second or third external backup disk so I can rotate better. More $.

Aaarrrrrgggggghhhhh!