You know that moment when you’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into spending hours, days, weeks, or even months on a document, and you’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into and then, suddenly, even though you’ve saved copy after copy on your computer, you can’t find it? Yeah? Well, me too. And it happened last night.
After logging over nine hours revising and editing my latest manuscript, I asked someone to read the first three chapters, ensuring there are no ghastly mistakes because I intend to send it out to an agent today (That’s a post in and of itself for another day). When he’d finished reading it, I went back to add something that I’d thought about while he was reading, and lo and behold, I couldn’t find the document, at least not the latest version that I’d saved throughout the day.
Immediately, my stomach turned and the tears started flowing. It’s now 11:30 at night and with the help of my family, we’re scouring through my documents/files. With no luck, I retook the helm (through blurry vision thanks to the tears) and typed in the same search word at the top of the document that I’d typed in the first time. Then I hit the forward button to find that word throughout the file. Imagine my surprise when I scrolled further into the document, found the term later in, AND it was the part that I had changed earlier…it was there!! And it had been the whole time.
User error? Absolutely! I had completely forgotten that I had that character’s name in more than one location, so when I’d done the first search, it had landed on the first time she appears in the book, the part that I HADN’T changed. But when I searched further, I found the section I’d changed. If I’d only scrolled further along the first time at 11:30, then I could’ve avoided the whole debacle. Needless to say, I laughed––not sure from relief or my daft behavior!
Lesson learned? Keep autosave on. And don’t panic until I check through the ENTIRE document.
