Oh my God, I’m gonna cry. I’ve posted in here a bit about a novel I was writing for ages and ages up until about two years ago, one that I set aside because I basically outgrew it. It had gone through five drafts. The fourth draft took two years and was done with a writing coach. When we were through, she sent her hard copies of it to me, complete with her notes. I then did a fifth draft on my own for about a year before the setting-aside occured.
I backed the whole thing up on a zip disk and removed it from my hard drive. Last December, I went back to look something up in the manuscript only to discover the zip disk was corrupted, and I had lost not only the fifth draft but the fourth. Just gone.
I was devastated. All I had was the fourth draft in a hard copy.
Well, short story long, I just found a backup of the fifth draft that I had buried on my hard drive at work!
This doesn’t mean I’m going to start working on it again, but to have not lost it, to still have it, that means everything to me. It’s my baby. I was its mother, I was its lover, for ten years. It taught me how to write.
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 