Lost & Found

Oh the pain! The ignominy! The utter shock of it all!

I am a nerd. A lightweight computer chick. I can write in html without an editor (woo hoo!), make a Lotus Notes database dance on the web, and use all kinds of obscure MSWord features.

But it finally happened to me today.

After a week of gathering my thoughts, I sat down to do a rewrite of my first two chapters, requested by the publisher. I've been out of book mode for months, as the manuscript left my hands in early October.

Two, maybe three hours of kicking it around. Nip here, tuck there, expand upon a few thoughts where requested. Struggled a little bit with how to make the requested changes and preserve the friendly tone of the book.

Paused to save and rename the draft (using today's date as part of the name). Wrote some more, saved some more. Felt pretty good about it and decided to close it out for some reason. I don't know why. Why oh Why.

It's gone.

I had sent the draft to my laptop, opened it up straight from Yahoo mail (knowing it to be virus free) and saved it to... wherever. Turns out 'wherever' was a temp folder that gets created on the fly when docs get downloaded from the internet. Said folder is unfindable, even if you purposefully save the document.

Now, despite a dozen carefully constructed searches and the expertise of a much bigger nerd than I (M., that's a compliment), I cannot find it. If you see it, please let me know (sniff, sniff).

UPDATE: It's FOUND!

I decided to do one more search for it tonight (when I sat down to re-rewrite and froze up). This time, the file search turned it up instantly. I suppose the search function wasn't seeing the most recent documents? Lesson learned, step away from the computer for a few minutes next time!

I think I'll go buy a lottery ticket, I'm feeling so lucky.