Do As I Say, Not As I Do.

For the love of God...don't do what I did a couple nights ago.  I was attempting to consolidate all the chapters of my manuscript into a single document, and...well, I fucked up.  The worst thing that could possibly happen, happened.  I committed the cardinal sin.  That one thing they warn you about.  The one thing that only dumb asshats like myself do.

I ended up deleting about 80% of my manuscript.

First off, I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing.  I was cutting, pasting, deleting, cutting, pasting, deleting...watching TV, yawning, eating, drinking, yawning, and then...*delete*  I deleted.  The wrong.  Document.

No problem, right?  Just go to the recycle bin?  Wrong.  I was working with the files on my thumb drive, and once you delete them from there, they don't go to the recycle bin.  There are just gone.  I did a computer recovery, setting it back to what it was a few days ago, but that didn't help.  The auto backups don't include the thumb drive.  Learn from me, my friends.  Learn from my stupidity.

So to the Internet I flew.  I downloaded multiple free file recovery programs.  Some were crappy, some were okay.  You get what you pay for.  Thankfully, because Baby Jesus loves me (or maybe not, because he allowed me to fuck up so badly), I was able to recover most of my stuff.  Some is corrupt for some odd reason, but I just happen to have a stash of various chapters (in varying stages of completion) buried on my computer hard drive at home and at work.  I can piece it all back together, but I'm going to have to re-write some.

Well, that's better than re-writing the entire thing, I suppose.

I leave you with this little nugget of advice, something I see every day on the wall at the office:

Practice makes perfect.

I'm not really the blogger I used to be.  Believe it or not, I used to be very prolific on LiveJournal, back in the day.  Way back in the day.  When it was still cool, and not overrun by creepy Russian spammers.  Now it gets routinely hacked, and yet I maintain my account there.

Why?

Because I have friends there, duh.  The online world is so vast, and yet I managed to acquire some great friendships within the great intarweb clusterf*ck.  Many of us have even met up in "real" life, which has only served to reinforce our friendships.

Anyway, case in point is that I should blog more.  I would say once a month, at least.  In college, my screenwriting teacher used to make us keep a journal.  The only way to get better at writing is to do it every day, he'd say.  Every day might be a little excessive at this point...but I definitely need to keep up with it more.