So here's a little ditti that I wrote on November 10th during the 2009 NaNoWriMo as a short pep talk to the NaNoLanta's taking part in the month long chaos of writing 50k words:

So, if anyone is paying attention, I added over 2500 words today to my word count. Never say die. But I knew I was just not going to be able to relate to my characters so I changed stories. I went back to another story I'd been working on and the words just flowed. If you're stuck, start something else, go back to this piece later or stick with the new one, which ever seems to be flowing. Try to stick it out with the original, if possible, but not to the point where it's detrimental to you and your writing. My story was just killing me. I'll write it, eventually, but for now it's on the back burner.

Everything worked out, so far, but I had one big snag today: I opened up the file on my other story and couldn't find several months of story that I had written. I work on two different computers so I was hoping that it was just on another computer but when I got home to check, none of the files had the additional word count. I was frantic. Several thousands words just gone. I called friends to see if two different operating systems could have wiped out the word count, or some crazy thing like that. I was about to go spiraling into the abyss. And all of this after questioning myself all day as to whether or not I was even a writer or just playing at this. But I finally realized what happened to my several chapters.

I never entered them into the computer. I had switched to longhand since I had been blocked on that story at one time too. I dug around in my briefcase and found the missing pages. I thanked the Lord above for my mini miracle and cursed my air-headedness. (no, I'm not really a blonde, no offense to other blondes).

But the lesson in this little [ahem] story is this: back up, back up, back up. I was devastated thinking I had lost a lot of work and hadn't backed it up. Even though my little mis-hap had nothing to do with a computer error or lost files, I still had my backup in the form of handwritten pages. So always hit that ctrl + alt + s, or is it ctrl + s? alt + s? (never said I was the computer genuis. I'll look it up and get back to you...)