After finishing my NaNo Novel I’ve been working on completing Chasing Shadows, the second part of Shadow Hunter. The goal was to get enough written that I would be able to start sending it out to readers by the end of January. Things were going well, I had written far enough into Chasing Shadows that the remainder of it was in Shalli’s POV. Since I will be reading for Shalli this meant the I could start editing the other POV characters and sending files out to readers. I had two readers confirmed and was looking for one, two or three more depending on how I did things. I was planing a podcast by the end of this week calling for readers.
That is when I decided to reorganize my writing files and back them up. I have done this in the past and have back up files from that last reorganization. To be honest my files had got quite disorganized with duplicates. I finished my reorganization and copied my writing files off to a USB key.
Yesterday I plugged the key into my computer and went looking for my work in progress, Chasing Shadows. To my shock the file was not there. I check around the key and still could not find the file. At home I searched through the files I had organized and still could not find the file. I did some searches and found some delete file restore programs. After some some work I was able to “recover” the file. I clicked on the file and watched in horror as the file opened but did not display the text of novel, instead it displayed a mass of unreadable characters.
I am currently looking at ways of fixing my file, but at this point I’m not hopeful. The only saving grace is that when I started writing this story I was writing it by hand. That means that I have only lost my work since the beginning of the year, about 1/4 of what I had. So I will continue to try and recover the file but in the mean time it looks like I’ll be typing out the story again, and re-editing the novel.
Because of this, obviously, Chasing Shadows will not be out as soon as I hoped. I do not have another novel to podcast at this point; my only two finished novels are Shadows Falls and Shadow of a Hero. Shadows Falls is part 3 of Shadow Hunter and Shadow of a Hero is book one of the series that follows Shadow Hunter. I will however look at what I do have and what I might be able to give you for content until Chasing Shadows is ready.
I will keep you updated.
