Losing Your Work

Yesterday I did something stupid.

During the day, I’d worked on my novel for about two hours. Not a huge amount of work was done, but I made a fair amount of changes and revisions, which I felt halfway OK about.

Then, at night, tired and bleary-eyed from a long week and weekend, I accidently saved the file from my hard drive to my flash drive instead of the other way around.

So: all that work was gone. And it was especially frustrating because I hadn’t worked on my novel for about a week, and so on the one day I do, I erased everything. Nice.

I posted something about this on Facebook, and someone responded he once lost two to three months of work due to a save mishap. He took the Zen approach and said it was a sign to start working on something else.

Losing two to three months of work would give me a seizure. I don’t think I’d take the Zen approach. I’ve lost stuff before, but never that much. (Last night I stayed up late troubleshooting and trying to reconstruct my changes while everything was still fresh in mind.)

There are famous stories of writers losing work: Hemingway’s first wife losing a suitcase that contained everything he’d written so far, Maxine Hong Kingston losing a manuscript in a fire, etc.

These kinds of things always make me wince, one of my greatest fears realized.

Any horror stories to share about lost work?