I Am A Moron

Someday, maybe I'll learn to take my own writing advice. You know, the really basic "never send out your only copy of a story" advice? Yeah, well.

As many of you know, I used to write the content (and do some other stuff) for About.com's Creative Writing for Teens website (now I do the PSP site). Well, a lot of the articles are tool-based, meaning you plug them into an online form, essentially, and it gets added to the database. Well, I developed a really bad habit of composing directly into the tool. And then I stopped doing the site. Leading up to my switch to PSP, I did start a word doc and cut and pasted the text from many of my articles into it. Except I don't know where I saved the doc. And now the CW for Teens site is no more (not just my version; About decided to remove it entirely). I have never been happier that Google caches pages--I found a lot of my old stuff that way. And the really old stuff I still have on the laptop harddrive. But there are a few bits and pieces that somehow never got saved anywhere but on the About servers, and which have disappeared from Google.

Yeah, so I feel a bit stupid. I didn't even think about it until someone emailed me looking for a manuscript format article I wrote. I did find that one, but now I have no energy left to email the guy back (even with a happy stomach full of sushi). Tomorrow, I guess.

It's not even that I'll ever need the stuff again. Unless I decide to pubish a how-to-write book, which I probably won't do. It's just mine. I made it. Geh. I will recover. At least it wasn't stuff I really cared about, like my fiction. Now that I have mostly saved in multiple places (some of it exists in various versions on floppy disk, laptop harddrive, cd-rom, Mac harddrive, and one or more hardcopies in a box somewhere in BC).

As soon as I'm done cat sitting, I'll be making sure updated copies of all my fiction is in multiple formats and possibly even different places (anyone want to volunteer to curate a hardcopy or cd of one or more stories? see, I'm paranoid now).