Moving on From The Great Data Loss of Twelve

Having discovered many of my word files corrupted, I proceeded There were chicken strips, multiple giant Carls Jr. burgers, fried zucchini, real sugar Coke and Pepsi (from Mexico where they still use real sugar to bottle it), salted caramel ice cream, and a pair of EMT's on standby with a pair of those paddles for my heart attacks.

So I had my sugar, I had my salt, and I had my fat.  I sat around all day watching TV and playing video games. It was a perfect setback kind of day.

Now it's time to get back to business.  Who-Ah!

Honestly, there is only perhaps one short story that was in the Dropbox that couldn't benefit from major revisions anyway.  There are a lot of worse fates that finding I'll have to retype stuff.  There is even a way to look at this event as beneficial...or at least not entirely shitty.

It's a setback.  They happen.  Sometimes they are generated by people, and sometimes they are generated by computers.  Usually cats have something to do with them....somehow.  Every writer is familiar with seeing their work go "pop," whether it's everything since the last time they saved (even autosave doesn't always work), a whole day's work or something larger.  Those still working with older forms of media have seen something physical happen to their pages from a wind to a fire, and anyone working on computers has likely had some kind of devastating data loss.

It happens.

It's just part of the cost of doing business.

What matters is how you deal with those moments.  Every job, every endeavor, every thing worth doing has moments of such profound setback-y-ness that it feels as if you are starting over. If you have a good piss and moan, dust off, and keep trekking, then you might just care about whatever it is enough to go the distance.

Anyway, it's a perception issue anyway.  Setbacks are annoying, but they're never as bad as they feel.  We can't unlearn the lessons or unforage the memories.

We're never really starting over after a setback.