BACK UP YOUR WORK!

Hey. I have been gone for a couple of days because I am an idiot. I hadn't adequately done what I always tell people to do. BACK UP YOUR WORK!

I was working on my mystery novel late Wednesday night when I noticed something was wrong with my laptop. I minimized my text and saw that all the icons were gone. And since I had just minimized my text, so was what I was working on. It was gone and I had no way of getting it back.

I do have a memory stick that I back up work on and my goal is always to save material on it at least once a week. But I hadn't used it in at least two weeks. So anything from the hard drive from the last two weeks wasn't backed up.

I have all of the first draft of my first novel, "Fighting Chaos," backed up, as well as later versions. It is all there.
But between 6,000 to 9,000 words of the mystery novel, "Death at the Jungle-bunny Journal" (a working title, of course), are not.

Apparently, the virus on my laptop makes it virtually impossible for me to fully boot up __ icons come and go __ but it doesn't appear that text is damaged. That is my hope. And on Thursday I might have gotten the latest version of the novel backed up. I'm just not sure yet. If so, I now have all of "Death" that I had done so far.

The computer tech guy who looked at my laptop says it will probably be nearly as cheap to buy a new laptop as to repair the four-year-old computer I have. But he thinks he can recover the data on the hard drive.

My wife says we can't afford a new laptop now and will have to wait at least until next month. So I guess I will be doing a lot of writing in long-hand. I just hate the idea of having to type in all that copy later.

So the lesson here, my friends, is two-fold. Always have the latest version on virus software that you can get and ALWAYS back up your work. It will save you headaches, if nothing else, in the end.

Next week I plan to discuss meeting a guy who just had his first novel published. He was on a book tour and I met him at an event at a bookstore. And also I plan to talk about independent bookstores.

But for now, thanks for reading and don't give up on writing. (And back everything up.)