Back up a little

   

I have to apologise, first of all, that I am not posting the final part of The Re-birth Story today. If all goes well though, I will post Part 3 when I next blog on 23rd January 2012. I will let you in on the exciting plans I had promised to share though.

Let me back up a little and explain why I have not managed to write what I had planned to. You see, November was gobbled up by:

-  my son, Kyle, finally arriving home from his Re-birth Europe trip,
-  pressures of arranging his 21^st birthday - dinner on the day and a week later two functions on one day (one in the morning/afternoon for family, and one in the evening for friends)
-  pressures of arranging a year-end function at work the same week,
-  having a guest for two weeks,
-  having my flash drive crash with little to no back up of what I was currently working on,
-  and finally, taking on the challenge of WNFIN (Write Non-Fiction in November), where those taking part had to write a non-fiction book in a month.

Snow in Africa? No - pool party for Kyle's 21st!

This brings me to my exciting plans. The project I began on 1 November for WNFIN was to turn the Re-birth story into a non-fiction book – written pretty much like a novel – combining my journey as a mother sending her son into missions with the journey these five young men undertook in August/September this year. This is an idea that had been mulling about in my head for several months.

The working title for this book is Pebbles in my Pocket.

I was doing pretty well, making great progress at around 40,000 words, when my flash drive suddenly crashed. I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to recover my documents from this dead inch-long electronic gadget.

Although my work is now scattered and interspersed between a myriad of folders and documents that don’t necessarily contain what they say they do, God has been good. For now, I have managed amongst other things to recover the presentation I was doing for Kyle’s 21^stcelebrations, and on Sunday night I recovered the last missing piece of work I had written on Pebbles in my Pocket before the flash died. This single page of work that had taken me a few hours to write was hiding inside one of the far too many recovered documents – this particular one clocking in at over 3000 pages of garbled text. Fortunately, most pages were dotted with only a few words and I managed to whittle that down to 30 pages of work from Pebbles in my Pocket, having deleted the rubbish and extracted a huge chunk of another manuscript I’m working on (my Irish novel).

Slowly, but surely, I’m recovering work as I need it. And yes, I have learnt a dear lesson … back up all the time, no matter what.