Thursday, August 21, 2008

The Limits Of Technology

Windows has encountered a problem and must close.

The Word program was in the process of saving the changes made to a manuscript that has been in progress for the past five years.

Windows encountered a problem and closed, the manuscript was lost.

Five years of work, disappeared. The only remaining glimmer was a recovered document in Notepad, a string of question marks, gibberish. The only copy of the manuscript that was being re-written from a second draft is as gone as if it had never been written.

All that remains is the first draft in hard copy, and a back-up of the first 18,000 words. The rest is lost to the limits of technology, to the crash of a computer program that wiped out five years of inspiration. I'm at a loss for words.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Casual reader, stumbled across your blog searching for the name of an agent reviewing my work. How terrible. Are you computer savvy at all? If not, there may very well be an auto-saved copy of the file on your computer somewhere. Check in your documents and also in the Word program files (trying doing a search for your manuscript)

In case you can't find it: I lost 178 pages last year. Totally fucked me. But when I rewrote it was much, much better. Good luck!

O hAnnrachainn said...

I'm technologically impaired, but I did try to find something salvageable. Unfortunately, I saved the thing to a flash drive, to keep the computer's hard drive free of my literary clutter.

I've started re-writing, and I'm hoping that the new version will be better than the last.