I Had a MAJOR upset today....

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!! I saved my progress after completing chapter seventeen which put me a little over 3,669 words away from the 50K goal when I submitted my progress. I checked back and *poof* the ENTIRE chapter seventeen was just gone! As in completely vanished...

After I got over my little panic attack while making dinner, I sat down and typed up notes for a rewrite of chapter seventeen and then sat down to rewrite the entire chapter again. Thank God I had the little nuances and important details still fresh in my head. As I rewrote the chapter little things equally important were re-jogged in my mind and I added them to the notes.

Finally almost three hours later I have completed the rewrite of seventeen. I even somehow added 22 words to my tally. I also add a smidgen more depth to the emotional turmoil in the chapter. *wipes brow* So As far as I can tell the new version of seventeen has everything important from the first chapter and a few new things.

I'm so glad I was able to calm down {thank you Japanese garden music and the Indian music i found on youtube a couple nights ago.} I had played them the first time around so I decided it couldn't hurt to listen to them again while I worked on the rewrite.

I had hoped to finish the last 3, 647 words I now need to reach the 50K mark by tonight, but after panicking over a completely ghosted chapter. THE most crucial one thus far since it's really the turning point of my entire plot line, mind you... and rewriting said vanished chapter, I'm totally drained for the night.

I just know that if I try to force out the last bit tonight I'm going to hit writer's block. Despite the fact that I planned out the remaining nine chapters earlier today and made notes for each chapter in the chapters, I;ve decided to settle for tomorrow instead and will spend the rest of the night relaxing amidst tending my sick hubby and kids.

{I've been sick for three days, both kids for two days and now hubby is sick too, so this week has not been nice to me or my word count.}

Has anything like this ever happened to anyone else? The vanishing chapter? I even checked my entire computer for it even the recycle bin and nothing...

I had something like that happen on my first laptop, eight years ago. I was using Microsoft Works, and every once in awhile a whole passage would just disappear in the middle of me typing. It was really annoying. It happened about three or four times before I literally started saving after every word, and once I got through that one passage it started working again. I guess it just didn't approve of what I was writing or something…

Ouch. That was rough! My deepest sympathies, and I hope your family's over their sickness soon.

The closest I've ever had to something like that was about, hmm, three weeks ago? Maybe a month. I'd been having trouble with my computer for a little while, and I'd taken it into Micro Center to have them look at it, and they basically said that since it was running, I should try putting it through some mild paces--he suggested watching a movie on it, but since the DVD drive is basically shot that wasn't going to work--and seeing if it worked all right. So I started working on a short story I'd had writer's block on for about six months, 'cause nothing cures my writer's block like not being able to get at my word processor. I spent most of a battery's worth of power writing, getting in a good three pages or so, and then *zap* the computer shut itself off, with about 26% left of power, I might add. Then it wouldn't turn on. So the next day I took it to Micro Center, and left it with them 'cause it still wouldn't turn on, and got it back the next day, 'cause it was a simple issue with the capacitor, but when I opened up the file, everything I had written was gone, even though I knew I had saved it about fifteen or twenty times while I was working. Even the auto-save didn't have anything other than the original file, as it had been before I started. And since it was a couple of days later, I wasn't sure quite how it had gone, either. I think what I re-wrote's okay, but I'll always have that nagging suspicion that the original was better. Still, it doesn't compare to yours, though, since that was just a doofy little short story--a fan fic, even--and this is NaNo.

Due to this little panic, I've been backing my NaNo project up on my flashdrives and/or external hard drive every single time I work on it, which is starting to feel a little OCD, but...

This is a good spot to remind everyone to backup in multiple places. Save to the cloud, put it on a flash drive, or email the last chapter to yourself. If nothing else, this lets you write on multiple computers, but can really save your bacon if your primary writing computer goes kaput.

Good luck remembering those words, and please backup in separate locations.

~j

I lost 365 words early on this year ... an updated Nano profile said I was ahead of where my laptop was. Yup. Vanished scene. I just hit the "lorem ipsum" generator for that number of words, pasted them in, and I'll fix it later.

It's laptops in general. I turn off the touch pad when I write. Otherwise, if you brush your hand against it without realizing it, you can accidentally select a big chunk of words and delete them without even realizing it. If you notice, control-z will get them back.

I've seen that before. Lost an entire section to a thesis an hour before it was due. Took banging my head against the computer table for an hour and lots of tears and then a "OMG I REMEMBERED TO SAVE AN EXTRA COPY TO AN EXTERNAL" moment to get it all back. Hate that panic-y moment though.