I have a tale to share about one of the challenges authors face…losing your work.
To set the stage, I was on the last chapter of the draft for the final book in the Legacy series. The end was in sight, so close I could taste it. Exciting times.
Then I opened my Word document and it was…wait for it…BLANK. I’m talking white screen with nothing there. Weeks of work, poof…gone. I almost had a heart attack.
I quickly closed the document, shut down Word, and tried again. Still blank.
(Pauses for a collective gasp.)
Now, because I know how technology can fail you, I back up my work regularly to Dropbox, have it syncing with Google, and do a complete backup of my writing folder to an external hard drive, so the world wasn’t going to end…unless Google Docs synced to the blank document and erased it. Spoiler alert…It didn’t. Whew.
The problem is, I do my daily backup around midnight and this was only early evening, so all my work for that day would have been lost. And trust me, it was a lot since I was near the finish line and super motivated to get it done.
It was a horrible gut-clenching moment of sheer panic.
There is a happy ending to this story, however. A window popped up as I was trying to figure out what had happened. Microsoft wanted me to finish setting up my account. What????? The account I’ve been using for years? Why? But Microsoft is a world unto itself and does pretty much whatever it wants to.
As soon as I finished updating my account, lo and behold, there was my document, completely intact. Taking a deep breath of relief, and waiting a moment for my heart to stop racing and the lightheadedness to pass, I immediately did a panic backup on my external hard drive. I legit called it “Panic Backup”. LOL
The moral of this story is you can never have enough backups for your work. I will be upping my frequency to several times a day just so I never have to face this kind of thing again.
But the important thing, and the one that will interest my readers the most, is knowing the draft for A Dragon’s Faith is done and going through its first round of edits. Yay!!!
(😊with lots of cheering and whistling)
Have a great day everyone. I’ll keep you posted as work progresses.
Sheri