Edit Loss

Just because I’ve put out five books and have several more ready to go doesn’t mean I know everything. I spent all last week editing Season One of The Drop. This time I’m editing by characters instead of straight through the book, allowing me to pick up on inconsistencies. The story is written from the POV of multiple characters, and no two chapters in a row are about the same character. Anyway, I opened my laptop last Friday morning to find that my document was in read-only mode and the edits I’d made during the week had disappeared. I attempted to find a version that contained all the changes, but alas, no joy. Here’s what I think happened: I left the document open all week in MS Word. Somewhere along the way, probably overnight Thursday into Friday, the OneDrive connection between my laptop and Microsoft’s server farm broke. Or maybe Monday, since none of my edits were saved online the rest of the week. Nevertheless, it choked and went back to Monday’s version. I tried in vain to find a version between those fateful days. What’s the lesson here? Part of it is my fault and part the vendor. I should know better than to trust an after-all-these-years-still-shaky operating system. Leaving the document open all week is, in retrospect, a bad idea. I thought I’d at least have a local copy, but somehow OneDrive messed that up. Which is not good, because that’s kind of the whole point of having your stuff backed up to the cloud. Lesson learned. I spent Friday morning and several hours on Saturday getting back to the point where I’d been on Thursday. And you better believe I’ll be more careful and less trusting.