Lost words

From now on I'm backing up my file every day. Plus saving it in a separate file for each day. That way I won't lose the last three days' work.

Since I've been really lazy the last few days, I only lost 966 words. But it still hurts pretty badly, especially when I'm so far behind with my goal.

I lost most of a scene, and there's no way I'm rewriting all that at the moment. So I'll have to go back later — at some stage when I'm less furiously angry with myself — and write the whole scene again.

And now I have to go on with an incomplete scene in my novel, which is messy and which I've been trying really hard to avoid this year, finishing every scene but one before I moved on.

I have back-ups, but my most recent back-up was made four days ago.

I had decided to write on my laptop for a while. So I copied my NaNoWriMo folder onto my pen drive, overriding what I assumed were the old files. Unfortunately, it seems I had been writing on the pen drive copy; so now I've overwritten it with an old file from several days ago, losing my word count from today, yesterday and the day before.

I'm angry with myself, and I'm really sad. I'll still keep my lost word count; but I've lost a part of my story. It's not just word count — it's story I've lost.

I should be glad that I only lost 966 relatively unimportant words. I should be glad I didn't lose a 10,000-word day — I think I'd have broken down if that had happened. But I can't be glad. Losing even 966 unimportant words hurts. It was a tricky scene to write, too, and I'd done it.

This is so demoralising.

Total words lost today: 966.
Total words written today: 1601. EDIT: 4693.
Words both written and lost today: 654.
Total words overall: Whatever. I don't care. I want to cry. EDIT: 38,404. You tie a knot, you move on.