Gave myself a heart attack this morning...

I had finished writing Chapter Ten of RUST this morning, and of course I went back to reread what I wrote in order to "brush it up" with a few minor edits. So I get to the section where Rifter is about to show the clan elder the Talisman...and I find it missing! I find a gap almost a page long has been deleted from my chapter. So I'm panicking, wondering if I accidently highlighted it and deleted because my palm brushed the touch pad on my laptop.

Umm...on a side note, before I continue on with my story: those touch pads are a pain in the hiney! When I am writing on the bus, and I forget to turn it off, my curser cursor jumps all over the page whenever my hand brushes the pad. I will be typing away merrily and all of as sudden my letters will no longer be appearing…and then I realize the curser cursor has jumped higher up the page and I am writing in the middle of a word of near perfect prose…sigh.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled post.

So I thought I had accidently deleted a page worth of story by way of the old Touch Pad of Doom! So I find myself faced with a dilemma that I am sure all writers dread: having to rewrite from memory something that you already wrote, but lost somehow. As the saying goes that lightning never strikes in the same place twice, it is hard to recreate the original prose in the same way.

I remembered some of the key phrases, but as I was writing it again I was sure I was missing some special nuances of the original text. I stared at my monitor and cursed my carelessness.

Then I remembered the blog post I wrote yesterday…

I had thought I had copied-and-pasted the text from my story into the blog post…but instead I CUT-and-pasted! My work was saved, all 340 glorious words of it. Thanking my lucky stars, I reinserted the missing prose and then saved it in IN THREE PLACES!!!