Curious case of the cursed MS

As much as I love my RWA Golden Heart® finaling MS, “Beauty and the Ballplayer,” I’m beginning to think it’s cursed.

Longtime readers of this blog will remember that I somehow lost the last 50 or so pages of B&B. It simply was gone from its Word document. Thank goodness I had a hard copy. All I had to do was retype — not completely reconstruct.

The MS has changed since then, of course. I finished the revisions detailed on all those Post-It notes on May 21.

On Monday, I received an agent request for the full. I took my GH sisters’ advice to read through the MS one more time before sending it off — and am I glad I did. Somehow, the version of B&B on my flash drive wasn’t the most recent version. Scenes that I’d deleted were still there and new additions were nowhere to be found.

Oh, the horror! My heart skipped more than one beat.

Luckily, I was able to boot up my wonky computer and retrieve a more recent version from the desktop. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that even that one didn’t contain the completed new draft.

Aargh!

I just spent four-plus highly caffeinated hours at Starbucks, rewriting a scene near the end and then editing out the rest of the things that needed to go to live up to the revised version.

I’ve also learned a very valuable lesson. This time, I e-mailed myself a copy of the completed revisions — both as an attachment and in the body of the e-mail. I’m not going to get caught without the most recent version again.