Ever have one of those days?  Or two of them maybe?

Yesterday, I completed the creative revisions on my upcoming novel, The Beat of a Different Drummer.  Now I'm ready to start formatting it for publication.

I do all my work directly on a flash drive, and make periodic copies to my hard drive as a backup.  I have been very busy with the final revision and realized it had been a while since my last backup, so I copied the book folder to the hard drive.  (Note: that wasn't a full backup of the flash drive.)

With that done, I took a break and decided to reprogram my fancy schmancy remote control to work with my new bluray player (thank you wife.)  I connected it to the USB port and the computer didn't recognize it, which is odd.  So, being safe, I ejected the flash drive the correct way, and waited for Windows to say it was safe to remove.

It turned out to be a bad USB cord, but when I was done with the remote and inserted the flash drive to work some more, Windows spent a LONG time checking the flash drive, and then reported that all 16gb were empty.

Horror.

I checked my backups and found a full backup from 12/1, which along with my morning book backup, would be pretty up-to-date.  So I started a recovery by copying the saved contents back to the flash drive. It failed and told me the flash drive was disconnected.

More horror.

I rebooted the computer and was pleasantly relieved to see the flash drive was actually intact.

Full BACKUP followed immediately.

DAY 2.
I started formatting today.  Setting the fonts, the chapters, and most importantly the page headings with page numbers.

The fonts I used for the cover were not available to Word (I sometimes use MS publisher or Adobe Photoshop to provide cover fonts), so I chose to grab images from the cover and insert them in the front page.  So far so good, until Photoshop froze the whole computer.

I had to think back, did I save my work?  NO.

A hard reboot with crossed fingers.  May I now say THANK YOU BILL GATES AND COMPANY!

Word opened with the OLD version sans formatting, but after a few moments, it offered up some backups it had made which I could choose to recover.

I'm taking a break for a while.