Oh, no...

A few posts back, I wrote that I'd lost the first three chapters (hard copy) of my most current WIP. Well, not only did I lose them, but it turns out that I lost the entire most current draft. Argh!

When I revise, I keep the older copies, and just retitle the newest one by whatever draft number it is. In the manuscript itself, I put the draft number in the header because I'm notoriously unorganized and quite often lose track of what draft I'm actually working on.

So, I sat down to begin the revisions on what I thought was the fourth draft. I pulled up that draft on my computer to reprint the first three chapters when, to my utter blonde amazement, I learned that I'm not working on the fourth draft, but in fact, am working on the fifth draft.

Rats.

So, somewhere in my overzealous packing last month, I must have tossed the entire fourth draft.

All together now:

"DUH!"

Talk about stupid. I've never tossed an entire current draft of something. NEVER. The four bankers' boxes still in my townhouse office can attest to that. Pack rat is my middle name. But no - determined to toss as much old crap as possible, I tossed out the very book I'm in the middle of revising.

Ugh.

However, the silver lining in this debacle is that I'm not having any AHA moments - nothing is jumping out at me, so perhaps I printed out the fifth, but hadn't started working on it. Or, I might have started changes, but never printed them out. So, in theory, there may not be a hard copy of the fifth draft. I'll never know.

So, the moral of the story is to never throw anything away, right? Nah... my office would become an absolute nightmare if I did that. However, I'm thinking that a little reorganization is what this situation calls for. So, from now on, when revisions are done, the hard copy gets tossed. That way there are no stacks of manuscripts lying around and nothing will get thrown out that shouldn't be tossed in the first place.

Ahhh.... there's hope for me yet, right?