ALWAYS BACK UP

Here's a lesson to all you would-be authors out there...

When you think it's about time to make a back-up copy of your manuscript on CD-ROM. Do it. Right then. Don't put it off because you're busy and you have a million other things to think about.

I almost made a CD with my latest TOTK draft Saturday afternoon - and didn't. By Saturday night it was too late. In a completely boneheaded move, I somehow managed to delete that draft from my hard drive without noticing - and then I destroyed the only other copy I had of it by overwriting my flash drive with documents from my hard drive.

All in the name of "backing up my files"!

Ironic isn't it.

Unfortunately, yesterday when I noticed what I had done, I could only rage and cry and reinstall my latest copy from the end of January.

It could have been much worse. I could have lost everything, if I hadn't bothered to make backups at all. I'm only out the work of the last month and a half - which, unfortunately, has been some of the most productive I've had in recent years.

I'm not back to square one - but I feel like I did get kicked back a couple of squares on four very important scenes.

I had been thinking I would soon be announcing that this draft was OVA' and that publication was just a bit closer to reality.

Now, all I can do is paraphrase Winston Churchill as a word of warning to other writers:

"Always back up. Always back up. Always, always, always back up things, great or small, large or petty."