Mirella was distraught. Her computer had crashed just as she’d finished the first draft of her most recent novel. There was no fixing the machine or restoring the document from the hard drive in which it was contained, her computer tech said. “Of course, you backed it up, right?” he asked.
She had and she hadn’t. Much of the manuscript was on an external hard drive by virtue of an overnight backup program that auto-ran daily. The problem was the drive had become full before the last third of the novel had been saved. Her tech always bugged her to check the remaining disk space. She always forgot.
He’d also told her one backup method was never enough. She did a second one the old school way by printing out what she wrote each day. The printed manuscript filled a decent-sized box. She put new pages in the box after finishing her daily writing. The box was kept in the hallway closet behind a locked door.
As a reward for finishing, Mirella had planned a two-day beach vacation. Instead, she bought a new computer and had the tech restore as much of the manuscript onto it as he could. Planning to retype the last third from her printouts, she unlocked the closet. The box wasn’t there. Dust covered the floor where it had been.
In a panic, Mirella searched her house. She looked in the office, the bedrooms, the living room, every closet and cupboard, the kitchen, the bath. No box. She sat down on her couch and wept. Sure, she could rewrite the last part from memory, but it would take months.
The ringing phone interrupted her hysteria. It was her sister. “Your copies are ready,” she said. “You know, of your manuscript.”
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