ACK! Double ack! So I've been working on the next story in the Glory Days universe for the last few weeks. Today, I finally got somewhere on it - or at least to the point that it's coherent and tight. Well, I saved it to my floppy and came back about an hour later to take another look and voila, the floppy has an error. "Unexpected error occurred while reading A:\sweetest_days.txt". Could you hear the scream? I rebooted and that didn't do a darn thing (and I'm really not sure why I thought that that would work).

Finally, I was able to open the file with MS Word - which apparently is more robust when it comes to corrupted files than WordPad is. Macs, especially, deal beautifully with corrupted files, but unfortunately, I no longer spend time near Macs. Anyway, got the file open and I quickly save it to the desktop. Then Word goes nuts. It decides that it must save the file to the floppy even though I've now changed the location to the desktop. So I humor Word (because it is the devil and I will not fight darkness... or something like that) and I'm patting myself on the back because I retrieved my file before that stupid paperclip decided to flash alerts and "Shutting down" messages at me.

But alas, the final joke is on me. I mostly have the story. I say "mostly" because somewhere along the line, chunks of text have been replaced with my disclaimer. That's right. Entire paragraphs gone, replaced with "All these toys belong to Paramount. Blah, blah, blah." And one paragraph is now nothing but question marks. Darned if I know what used to be there. And I assure you, the missing paragraphs were the very best parts of the story. ::sigh::

Who says writing is easy?