I had a whole post teed up from over the weekend. It should have been sitting here safely waiting on me to do some final edits in Word before dropping it over into WordPress for publication. However, it’s currently not sitting anywhere on my computer. There’s no record that I even edited or saved any documents over the weekend. It’s also not in WordPress. Not in my drafts, not sitting in my scheduled posts file, or anywhere else.

It has well and truly disappeared. And frankly, I don’t have the energy to put into trying to recreate it from scratch.

As of a couple of weeks ago, I’ve officially made 4,000 separate blog posts dating way, way back to February 2010. I say 4000, because that’s how many I’ve written – well, 4,004 including this one. I’ve only made 3,989 of them public. Believe me when I tell you the ones that are sitting there in private mode are some real humdingers. Most of them won’t see the light of day until after I retire, if then. They’re the few examples of times I couldn’t tell the story while obscuring at least some identifying elements slipping through. 

In any case, after 4,000+ posts, you can count on one or two fingers the number of times I’ve simply had one of them eaten whole. That’s the entire reason for my workflow of writing everything first in Word. I don’t expect this to become a common occurrence, but it does mean I’m going to have to take some time coming up with a better failsafe. I’ve got too many things sitting here in various stages of draft to worry that they’re going to randomly start disappearing.

At least I’m not getting paid for this, so all I’ve lost is time… though that may be the most insulting loss of all.