Three weeks ago my flash drive went missing.  You know, that little blue one my husband gave me for Christmas that has been attached to my person nonstop since?

Yeah, that one.

I immediately flew into a blind panic and tore apart everything in my house, at work, and in my car. I checked friends’ houses (I was dog-sitting at the time) and even put messages up at work begging people to bring it back if they had it.

NOTHING.

Crap. Okay. So that was the point when I started assessing the damage.  Finished stories… pulled all of those out of my email that I didn’t already have because I’d submitted all of them. Not a problem.

In Progress stories… All but one were backed up on my laptop. One wasn’t. but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Pictures… the ones of Alice, okay. The ones of my Dad… Gone.

That immediately set me off into a crying fit… those pictures are all I have left of him. That and a .45 muzzle loader that I’ll never fire. Once that was done, I broke down and installed Dropbox on my work computer.

Then I went to my mother’s house and got new copies of the pictures that weren’t already up on Facebook. I’m covered there.

So back to that story…

You know that story I’ve been writing about the cowboy?  That’s the one that wasn’t backed up because it’s the one that I’ve been feverishly writing for the last month. Inspiration struck and I started going and going and going and… you get the point.

The story WAS up to almost 29,000 words, or the half-way mark. I’d just introduced the massive conflict. I was on the downward slope… and then I checked the backed-up version.

16,790 words. Shit. (There was a lot more to that screaming fit than one word, but I’ll spare you the details.)

I immediately went to my notebook and started looking over what was hand-written, and of the 12,500 or so words that were missing, I was thinking I had about 6,000 of them. Okay, so I sat down and started rereading the end of the typed file. And immediately became discouraged. VERY discouraged.

I’ve already written this. It was fine the first time. I don’t want to do it again.

So for the last month I’ve been opening and closing the document, willing myself to get back to work on it, but no such luck. The steam, she is gone. Completely.

Until Sunday… I opened my notebook for something unrelated and happened to flip through the first few pages.  That was the point when I realized that I hadn’t lost over 6,000 words. I had the vast majority of the story still in the notebook. Granted it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 28 pages of hand-written mess, but it’s there. Best guess now tells me I’m only missing about 4,000 words. I know it’s about that much because there’s a sex scene in the middle of the mess that topped out around 2,500.  If that’s the majority of what I’m missing, then I’m good.

Now I just have to get off my butt (or sit on my butt depending on how you look at it) and get it all typed up again. At the rate I was going on it, I could easily have it finished by the end of August.

Even if I don’t, I know the words aren’t going anywhere… it’s just the longer I sit without doing it, the harder it is to get motivated again.

I really do have other things to worry about besides this. I need to keep moving forward and I really hate backtracking. Yes, it would only take me two hours or so to get everything typed back up, but I have to recreate segues and various other tidbits, so I’m looking at a two day setback.

Wish me luck, guys.