I thought I was walking away from writing. I was heartbroken. Our cat Phillip had knocked a hard drive with all of my writing on it off my desk. I know you are supposed to have backups. So how did this happen?
I had discovered that the external I had used for years was dying, it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. So I grabbed my new external and moved everything to it. I didn’t have a second drive handy and figured I’ll go out on Monday, as there was no chance of me going anywhere near a store on Black Friday, and get a new drive and back up the entire drive.
Well, enter Phillip on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. He was playing on my desk, something he wasn’t really supposed to be doing. He pawed the drive off onto the floor. My desk is in the garage, so the drive crashed onto a bare concrete floor. I knew it had been damaged when I heard rattling inside the case.
The next day I rushed the drive to a geeky friend that has experience in putting Humpty Dumpty drives back together or at least recovering the information. In my case, there was nothing anyone could do, it was too badly damaged. My precious words were gone forever.
I was heartbroken. I thought I might as well give up writing, which prompted the walking away post. The more I tried not to write, the worse I felt. I had to write. So I scoured my flash drives and other storage devices. Since I write on multiple machines, there was a chance that there was at least an old copy of something somewhere. I did find an outline version of one manuscript but all my changes to my main manuscript had been lost.
So what have I changed? There has been velcro, as in industrial strength type velcro, added to my drives. Now they can not be knocked or pawed off my desk. I have not one but two backup drives. I have started an entirely new project. Nope, no one, not even my wonderful and most supportive writing partner Judy L Mohr, has seen a single word of this project. I’m not sure she will for some time.
I will eventually work on the outline project and breathe life into those thoughts and make it a full project. As for Path, I have yet to decide its fate. It may live in its needing polished state for some time as I’m not ready to go back to it yet.
Let’s face it, writing is in my blood. There was no way I could give it up entirely. Oh, and yes, the cat is still alive but he has learned not to put a single paw on my desk, not a paw.