Gone, but hopefully not forgotten...

This past week, I lost three screenplays, including the TV pilot that I'd just completed. How? Coffee spilled on the laptop keyboard, complicated by a lax backup system.

How did I let this happen? Still on a bit of a buzz from a weekend trip to L.A., I reached down to pull my dog, Charlie, up onto the settee. Thoughtlessly, I shoved my elbow back and wham! There went the coffee.

I immediately turned the laptop upside down to drain the liquid. I thought it was dry, so I turned it up right, just in time to do a quick backup to an external hard drive before the crackling began. Yes, it fried.

Thinking I had saved everything, I was not totally distraught. I had planned to replace the laptop within the next few months anyway.  But five days later, after exhaustive searches of the external hard drive, the three scripts were not to be found.

I plan to engage someone who knows how to search the external hard drive better than I. (The computer's internal hard drive is unreadable.)  Hopefully that person will know a trick or two about where those files might be hidden. But truthfully, I have very little hope of retrieving them.

What's next? I shall attempt to rewrite the TV script. I'll count the other two feature scripts as practice and will not recreate them.

What's the lesson? Don't place liquids by the laptop.  Do backup files regularly but also backup in multiple ways the things that I'm currently working on.