Losing Work

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I pride myself in always remembering to save my work and usually saving it in more than one place and then keeping those two places physically apart when I’m not with them. So, I take my memory stick everywhere with me.

I don’t therefore know quite what happened on Friday. I managed to do six hours writing though barely scraped the 2,000 words I like to do during a day, let alone the 6,000 that six hours I should have produced.  No doubt because I kept checking emails, answering the phone and fiddling with Twitter.  Some emails then meant I had to look up other information. In order to find that I had to get back to the desk top and therefore had to minimise all of these that were open. In addition, I had some files open that I wasn’t changing and they came form a memory stick that was full.

So, the inevitable happened. I clicked on the “close” icon instead of the “minimise” icon. I clicked on “No” instead of “Yes” when the computer asked me if I wanted to save changes. On any of the other open documents it wouldn’t have mattered – at least, not as much. But this one was six pages of the first draft of a novel – and represented six hours’ work – even if it was six hours with major interruption.

I can’t understand how I managed that, because I always save my work when I go to the loo, when I answer the phone, when I stop for lunch and when I stop for a coffee or tea.     

Madness.  In both senses.

Then I remembered the first ever book I wrote. A pastiche of a Famous Five book. I was only about nine at the time. I read and reread my work. I even read it as I walked along the road to school.  In the end it didn’t matter that the wind whipped up and blew my work away, straight into a puddle. It was illegible.

But do you know what? I soon rewrote it and improved it even more. You see, we actually have this really smart computer in our heads. I’m hoping it will also get my six hours back.  

Next time, I’ll concentrate just on that writing.