Disasters and Other Minor Complications

You might be wondering why I start the blogging year this late. After all, January is all but over. Truth be told, I just didn’t have the nerve to sit down and tell you about the boring things that happened, so I decided to wait for something worth talking about.

I should have known better… Since disasters are more newsworthy than most other stories, it stood to reason that I would be struck by it. And I did.

During January, I wrote most of the first draft of an eBook about coding eBooks by hand. Last week, I dove into the Bells&Whistles chapter that I had been looking forward to. Over three days and a weekend, I wrote several thousand words. Since I’ve been a programmer for quite a while, I made sure that my backup program was backing up according to schedule, and thought nothing could happen to me and my material. Fat chance!

When I opened the file on Monday afternoon to add a link to a resource I had found, half the file was missing all of a sudden. No explanation, no reason. Word hadn’t crashed and neither had my PC. I still don’t understand what exactly happened to the rest of my file. Relaxed, I called up my backup which had run the night before and searched for the file — it wasn’t there.

Argh… This hadn’t happened to me in years. I actually cried about losing that much work. But I recovered. By now, I’ve recreated most of what I lost already and made it even better than it was before. My stubborn mind insisted that the would not keep me from finishing the manuscript.

And then… my eldest lost her passport, and I got a cold and needed to see the doctor, and my other two kids got two days off of school… It seems as if someone has conspired against me.

But I will get this manuscript done, no matter what. It just might take a little longer than I had planned. And (I think) it made for a good blog posts.

And the morale of the story?

Never give up, never surrender!