Losing part of a chapter is always a colossal pain in the rear and always feels like the end of the world. And the only way to deal with it is to accept, for the moment, that it is gone, gone, gone from your computer and sit down and try as far as you can to write the damn thing again from memory. I have done this with fiction and I have done it with critical work - I had to reconstruct about six thousand words of the Superheroes book and did it in an afternoon. The sooner you get to it, the better, because you will remember more and more as you sit down and work on it.
Sorry to be Job's comforter on this, but the only thing to do is to continue the roll by using it to reconstruct what you have lost. With any luck - and this has happened to me on occasion - you will find the roll continues and carries you into new territory.
Oh, ugh. Is there any way you can move the file without opening it? Copy it to another folder, attach it to an email and send it to yourself? If nothing else, you might be able to open it using Notepad and recover some of the text.
Sorry, I mentally put in a comma that wasn't there. That really is a pain - and the same principle probably applies, but is even harder. I had that happen once, too, and I just despaired, which did me no good at all, because I had to knuckle down and write the damn thing anyway.
You might want to consider posting the chapters to LJ, even if you private-lock them. My computer tried to corrupt the file on one of my original projects, and I think I would've been up a creek if I hadn't been posting bits on my writing LJ as I finished them.
1. Google Docs 2. A non-LJ blog, with private access (the highest I could get) 3. MS Word, hard drive 4. A floppy (not that I think it will do any good, but saving it was the only way to close the corrupted file)
If you can think of any places that would be safe and have no risk of access from anyone else, I'd be thrilled. Thank you.
Does your computer have enough memory and RAM for the applications you're running? This freezing and corruption of files problem happened to me a lot until I upgraded my RAM and moved my downloaded TV programs to an external hard drive. Now everything works fine and it was much cheaper than buying a new computer!
If your computer is more than 3 years old, it's probably not worth doing - it would be about as cheap to get a new hard drive. If your computer is newer than that, Control Panel > System will say "XXMB of RAM" on the General tab. If you're running Microsoft programs, 256MB would now be the absolute minimum. 512MB should run okay if you don't have graphics programs. My computer runs nicely at 1G of memory. Check the price of RAM compared to a new hard drive, though - unless you have a laptop, it can be cheaper just to buy a new hard drive and keep your old peripherals
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Sorry to be Job's comforter on this, but the only thing to do is to continue the roll by using it to reconstruct what you have lost. With any luck - and this has happened to me on occasion - you will find the roll continues and carries you into new territory.
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And it's just one floppy disk that was working until an hour ago. I don't know what's wrong.
But right now, I'd like to reprogram this computer with a sledgehammer.
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1. Google Docs
2. A non-LJ blog, with private access (the highest I could get)
3. MS Word, hard drive
4. A floppy (not that I think it will do any good, but saving it was the only way to close the corrupted file)
If you can think of any places that would be safe and have no risk of access from anyone else, I'd be thrilled. Thank you.
Reply
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