I feel crippled without these maps. I mean, I still know the story, but they were a reference. If I was writing a scene in a particular city (and the characters travel a lot and very quickly), I wanted to know the terrain, the nearby cities, the climate, etc. I have vague memories of the maps (well, more than vague, but not photographic by any means). I could re-draw them, but I'm afraid they'll never be the same again.

Losing your creation is very hard. First anger, then sadness, more anger followed by self pity. What can you do, but move on. It is a hard place to be in, I have been there.

Any way of re-creating those maps from your story? Kind of reverse engineering?

I tell you what, when I've lost stories the first thing I do is fret. The second thing I do is despair. Then I finally get my act together and get it back.

The thing about stories, ideas, and yes, even maps, is that they were made up our of our heads in the first place! That's right, they're still there in the reaches of our brains, not in their perfect form, but in remanants and at least in overarching themes.

Ahh, you say, but you'll never get them back in their original and perfect form. Sadly, you're right. But I bet you'll come up with something even better from the act of recreating them! I know I have. As I sit there and sturggle to come up with exactly what I had before I think, but what about z. Dont reject z because it wasn't in your original idea, take a look at it for it's potential value.

What I found when I went back to the keyboard without these "things," was...a clearer way.

What I ended up *without* was the time I'd taken to produce those great things.

It didn't matter, though, because somehow, in losing those "things," I found myself forced to "get right down to it" a whole lot faster.

And I did. And it was a better read.

Here's to losing things. (Sometimes.)

I couldn't re-write the scenes the way they were. That would be MUCH harder than redrawing a map (i think). Just like your map, though, these scenes had to fit into the idea of my story, and I'll tell you what . . . doing it for the second time, it's bound to turn out better.

Had to restore from a 2 month old backup, which hurt.

After saving the document, I FTP it to a password-protected directory on my website. (I do that not only for backup purposes, but also so that I can work on the file from multiple computers.)

So, being lazy and paranoid what is my solution? I use a little piece of software called Iomega Automatic Backup. What it allows you to do is copy stuff from one place to another (another computer, drive, CD-RW, Zip, whatever) on a regular basis, without you having to remember to do it.

For all my important stuff (which must include all my writing) I have it backup any changed files every twenty minutes. I also have it set up to keep five versions of everything. This means the backup takes up a fair amount of space, but disk space is cheap these days.

I also have backed up stuff to my website like Eric, but not often, because that seems too much like work. I also make optical backups every month or so. I love my new DVD-Multi writer. 4.7 Gigs is a lot of stuff.