So I began writing at midnight and stopped around 1:30am. Went to bed, had breakfast, and began writing again at 11:30am. Had a break for lunch in the late afternoon but mostly wrote with short little breaks here and there until 6pm. Then there was panic and tears. I saved my novel on my USB drive and did an update of my word count on the NaNoWriMo web site. I was at 46k. Then I could no longer access the file.

Seriously. I checked the USB drive and it was no longer there. No Word document existed beyond a review I sent out last week. I then tried to paste the information into Notepad since it should have still been in the clipboard. No dice. So I rebooted. Each time I tried to access it, I was given a message that the file was corrupt or had a virus and was locked by the antivirus program. The USB drive was clean of viruses like I thought it would be. The last backup I had emailed to myself was from 11/20/08. I had 29k at that point. My obvious choices were to (1) start over at 29k or (2) copy and paste words until I hit 46k again then pick up the story at that point. I went with the least obvious choice. I searched my USB drive for *.tmp files and found one at 5:45pm. When I opened the temp file in Word it was only missing the last two paragraphs. I could rewrite a few hundred words without any problem.

My daily word count for the 30th was 8270 words. My total word count ended up at 50015. That was painful. Oh so painful. I do not want to do this next year playing catch up, get ahead, fall behind, catch up, get ahead and then fall behind. With an hour and 5 minutes to spare I validated a winning word count. And I even wrapped up all of the plotlines in the novel.