I Lost Months of Work — Now What?

You can read my follow-up to this situation here: Changing my Focus After Losing Two Months of Writing

It was a technical error.

I was trying to troubleshoot the reason why all the storage space on my new laptop was quickly filling up. I spent hours working with an AI assistant trying to identify and remove the culprit. Along the way, I noticed that a cloud storage service that came pre-installed with my new system but didn’t want still had claim over gigabytes of my primary drive. I deleted it, then continued my work. Eventually, I realized that a different cloud storage service was duplicating anything I stored to my online storage on my physical system as well. I removed the duplication, and suddenly my hard drive had hundreds of gigabytes available again. Problem solved.

The next morning, I went to open one of my current short story drafts for my upcoming anthology. It was gone. The story was gone. Its folder was gone. The entire collection of my writing was gone. All my presentation notes and work for editing clients and financial records.

Gone.

I realized that my system had continued to use the storage folders for the cloud service rather than the default folders of my laptop, and when I deleted them, I lost everything I’ve done since acquiring my new system in April. I do have the backups I created at the time of transfer, and some of my recent manuscripts were stored exclusively online so I could write on them when away from my regular computer, but there’s still months of work that is not recoverable.

I feel numb. I feel detached and lost. In moments of lucidity, I start thinking of all the things I could have or should have done to prevent this, but the emotional pain is so intense I flee back into the gray void of numbness. I’ll have momentary attempts to rationalize that this was a mistake. That I was still figuring out my new system. That I thought I was backing up my work correctly. That I don’t deserve the depths of toxic perfectionism and self-loathing that are struggling to drown me. But mostly, I’m still numb.

I wish I could give a silver lining or a hopeful ending here. But that feels like trying to negotiate with grief. “I’m sorry you had a house fire, but at least it only took two rooms.” It sucks that your dog died, but at least you have another one.” “Yeah, you lost months of work, but you haven’t lost everything.” All true statements, and I’ll probably hear and even say things that sound just like them as word about this spreads. But they don’t help the pain and loss. They’re just words that fill up space for a moment then disappear.

I’m not writing this for sympathy. In fact, there’s a strong temptation to turn off comments on this post and any announcements about it that I may make on my socials. My purpose in writing this is to be accountable to my fans, writing students, and editing clients that will have expectations of me in the coming weeks. Even if there was no loss of work for some specific project, the cumulative weight of grief is going to make functioning at my usual output difficult or even temporarily impossible.

Please be patient with me as deadlines and goals are shifted and reassessed. I’m not trying to make excuses, but this is not something I can functionally or emotionally shrug off. I’ll post more updates as I feel the need, but for now, just know that I am in a tender place, and appreciate any grace that can be extended on my behalf.