Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Writer Hell

Hello folks,

I had my own version of Writer Hell this morning. The next time you get down about writing, remember this anecdote.

My thesis novel for Seton Hill is killing me slowly. Recently, it occurred to me that I needed to haul ass or burn rubber or something if I wanted to finish and graduate on time. So I instituted a 1000-word-a-day plan. For anyone who was around last October and remembers my 531-a-day project (aka my urban fantasy), this is that on steroids.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, no one/nothing is perfect…including computers. I made an “oops” this morning. I was chugging along about 500 words into my thousand for the day. Things were good.

And then I (completely accidentally and in the span of about 2 seconds) selected all, hit backspace, saved, and closed the file. I had 2500 words of this month’s submission in this document.

Oh. my. God!

Needless to say I was not happy. I also had a full blown panic attack.

Did you know that windows can only recover previous versions of a document if you didn’t close the document? Me neither, but I was not happy to learn this.

That didn’t help the panic attack, and post learning this fact I fled to Google and began my frantic search for a solution.

Nothing.

In a stroke of desperation, I downloaded a file retriever and ran it on my flash drive.

Results!

I got back Monday and Tuesday’s progress—2000 words. Holy Hell, yes, that’s fine. I needed to seriously rework what I’d written this morning anyway.

I’ve never been happier to see 2000 words in my life.

And so it is with everlasting gratitude that I give a shout out and a big promotion to Pandora Recovery. You saved my thesis and possibly my life.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

2 comments:

  1. Well done finding that recovery program! I've done stuff like that and then just climbed onto the couch with a drink and a TV show. One thing that helps avoid that spiral is emailing your work to yourself at the end of every day.

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    1. I was sooooo glad I found it. heh

      I need to get back into the habit of emailing my work to myself. Thank you for the reminder. :)

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