J. S. Kuiken

I was all set to write a post about the last few weeks of working on the rewrite of my novel. The post was going to be informative and about . . . something.

Instead I bought a new flash drive. In the process of transferring files to this new flash drive — which was going to be only for my writing, and not all the other things I have a flash drive for — I lost all the work I’ve done on my novel for the past two weeks. All but a few files.

I am not sure how it happened, really, except I was being careless when copying and deleting. I usually back up all my files in multiple locations, but guess who hadn’t bothered to do that since July?

Yeah.

Fortunately I had handwritten a lot of materials over the past two weeks, so it was really just a matter of going back and retyping a lot of information. I lost the chapter by chapter outline for my book and entire first chapter. It was a short first chapter though, and most things are better when they’ve been rewritten (again) anyways. I also lost chapters of another book I was writing, but it was a first draft so I’ll mourn for that later, or not at all. Whichever is most convenient really.

It’s not been much fun, trying to recover deleted files and finding 3/4 of them are too corrupted to be use-able. It’s a good reminder to never be lazy about backing up my files. This is also a reminder to all you other writers out there: BACK UP YOUR FILES. Triple back them up, in fact.

The irony is that yesterday, before the snafu of accidentally deleted files, I was thinking of how bewilderingly easy the rewriting had been going.

Oh universe, you have such a tricksy sense of humor.

Well, back to the grind.