Mysterious file transpirings

Patrick and yukinooruoni came over last night to hang out and gab. And yukinooruoni brought me a prezzie: a bottle of dessert wine! I’m thinking I might open it this weekend. Or maybe I’ll save it for a special occasion.

In the course of our chatting, I discovered that there are still apparently a number of Daily Dragon articles floating around somewhere, unedited and unpublished. I thought I’d consolidated all the data onto my personal USB flash drive in the big clean-off-the-computers activity that Monday, but apparently there are still files on the other flash drive that need to be extracted. Oops.

   


Writing Stuff

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I seem to have lost all the progress I made on the as-yet-untitled Japanese fantasy story yesterday. When I opened up the file this morning, it had reverted back to how it was at the end of Tuesday.

Mystifying and irksome that. I’m not egregiously put out–no hair rending or shrieks of outrage at the cosmos–because yesterday was mostly about research. The primary changes I made consisted of a few hundred words of tightening edits and a bit of scene fleshing out, all fairly straightforward to replicate without overmuch brain strain, not to mention all my research notes were intact. I’d be needing a padded cell right about now if I’d laid down thousands of new words, so it could’ve been much worse.

Still, I’m a bit flummoxed. My best guess is that I didn’t save my file before shutting down for the day, except that’s just not like me. I hit SAVE with almost compulsive regularity–conditioned as I’ve been by a randomly powering down laptop and other fun-and-exciting hardware adventures. And I thought Word did automatic saves at regular intervals anyway? Plus, wouldn’t Word have asked me if I’d wanted to save my changes if I’d closed the file without saving?

I also checked my temp file cache to see if I’d accidentally saved it there, as well as my other folders to see if I’d somehow managed to relocate it. Nope.

Weirdness.

Did I unwittingly offend a computer diety yesterday?

I’m now back to where I was when I shut down yesterday, perhaps minus a scintillating line or two, or with a slightly-more-awkward sentence construction here and there, but those are minor editing issues.

I’m also compulsive about making backups, which all of my experience with these helpful but maddening technological gadgets is further reinforcing . . .

Received:
– Payment from Her Circle Ezine for their reprinting of “Second Daughter” pending a bit of PayPal-related awkwardness.

HCE paid me via debit card to my PayPal account, but it’s a Personal Account, and so it balked at accepting payment without being upgraded. I declined its repeated exhortations to upgrade (no, I don’t want PayPal taking a fee+percentage out of this and all future monies. Yes, I’M SURE, dammit!) and so had to refuse payment. Happily, an email to the editor explaining the situation resulted in a “we’ll send you a money order forthwith.” So it’s all good.

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5 Responses to Mysterious file transpirings

  1. nmsunbear says:

    Plus, wouldn’t Word have asked me if I’d wanted to save my changes if I’d closed the file without saving?

    That’s what I was thinking. Weird. Maybe you just dreamed your editing pass? 🙂

    • Eugie Foster says:

      Hee. When I came up against this odd file mystery, I actually turned to one of my co-editors, , to verify what day it was and to confirm that I hadn’t hallucinated all of Wednesday.

  2. j_hotlanta says:

    Usually when I’ve been smitten by the computer gods like that it’s the result of having a bunch of reference documents open and hitting ‘close’ to the wrong thing. I think I’m saying ‘don’t save’ to the reference document when actually I’m saying ‘don’t save’ to the document I’m editing.

    I’ve rarely seen Word do stuff by itself unless something gets funky in the default template. Ususally it’s an operator error. If this happens again then you may need to delete and re-create the default template.

  3. random_42 says:

    We discovered Muscato D’Asti while in Italy – you can get it here, most good stores will carry a few bottles in the back somewhere. It’s sort of a cross between champagne and ice wine. Not something you’d want to drink lots of but a nice change of pace from the standard bubbly.

  4. I learned the hard way that Word does not automatically save unless set to do so. B fixed it for me, but after losing three hours of revisions on three novel chapters, I abhore the Word diety and HE hates me back.
    Good luck with replicating those revisions!

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