Monday 5 September 2011

A hard-learned lesson

My goal of 10,000 words by the end of August was achievable.  I'd written 5,000 and with the children away and DH also away for the weekend nothing was going to stop me ... far from it, I knew I'd sail past 10,000, maybe even reaching 15,000.  I sat up late into the night, hunched over the keyboard, eating pasta as it's quick to cook and even quicker to eat.  The only person I saw was the Tesco delivery driver for 5 minutes on Saturday morning. 
Then disaster struck Sunday evening......  I'd had a problem with the computer tower earlier in the month and had bought a new one, the local computer shop managed to save all my work and photos and transfered them onto the new tower.  So to stop any danger of work being lost on the tower in the future I started working off my hard drive, thinking it's only me who uses it so everything would be safe.  Until Sunday night .... the power lead failed in some way ..... all I could see on the screen were my chapters in feint outline. I tried to open one or two, the hard drive closed itself down and that was it.  The whole lot lost for good.  The computer shop did their best but only found very old drafts done way back at the beginning of the year, they bear no resemblance to the versions I'd been working on and they couldn't find any of the chapters I'd typed up that weekend.
Deep breath time ..... soul searching time ...... was it worth carrying on? ....... shouldn't I just give up? ....  then small snippets of chapters started coming back to me, not exactly the same but many of them better than I remembered writing at 2am.   So no, I'm not going to give up.  I'll carry on to the bitter end and on the way I'll be saving it to the hard-drive, the tower, printing out a copy and emailing it to my yahoo account....... surely four copies will be enough??  And at least I've only lost a handful of chapters .... I could have been at the end of the novel, ready to pitch and seen them all disappear in front of my eyes ;)

2 comments:

Anna-Marie Bailes said...

Oh no! What a nightmare! You are to be congratulated on your determination to carry on and like you say, the quality of your writing will doubtlessly improve the second time around. Better get stocked up on printer ink!

Sandra Hill said...

Thanks Anna-Marie ..... think it's grim determination or maybe ** mindedness that's keeping me going, that and the need to take something new with me to read at our next writing group sessions :)