I spent most of yesterday writing a blog entry about, well, writing. I worked very hard on it, and I thought I saved it, but when I opened the file this afternoon to finish the entry, it was gone. Welcome to my nightmare. I love the computer. I can edit. I can revise. I can rearrange whole sections of my manuscript without having to retype the whole thing. Best of all, I don’t have to decipher my own handwriting. And I can save all my work with the press of a button…maybe.

                Yeah, I know. I should back everything up regularly—and I do. Every one of my books is backed up frequently in several different mediums. I learned this costly lesson when my hard drive crashed and took the most recent version of my manuscript with it. I had to reenter the whole thing using the hard copy (thank heavens I had that). But this blog entry was something I was doodling on. I meant to come back to it later. And I clicked on save. I even checked to make sure it had saved, and there it was under my docs –“Stuck in the Middle.” It just had nothing inside. When I opened the document, the page was blindingly empty. (And yet Word still took several minutes to run a virus scan and check for errors.)

Here’s the thing I can’t understand: Why did the program go to all the trouble of creating a file if there was no actual document being saved? It seems like a cruel ploy to get my hopes up—which leads me to believe that I might have gremlins. I am researching them for my current work-in-progress and they seem to like to wreak havoc with anything mechanical or electronic.  (Did I mention that my hard drive completely recovered and still works? The only permanent casualty was all my information.) My oldest daughter has been building fairy houses all over my yard. Maybe she’s attracted the wrong sort of fairy.

My husband, who is something of a computer guru, has promised to try to find my lost blog entry in whatever corner of cyberspace it has been banished to. However, I couldn’t help noticing that he didn’t sound all that hopeful. Still, I will let him try, and, if it works, I’ll post both the blog and where he found it. In the meantime, one of my daughters just informed me that she’s lost her homework. I looked at her and said, “Me, too.”