The WDC NanoLounge

I totally feel your frustration, and despite the fact that everyone is probably going to tell you not to give up and hugs and all that fluffy stuff, I'm going to say something slightly different.

How much do you love your story? How much do you think you can recapture that inspiration you had for the '4,000 words that you lost? If the answer is you love your story and you feel you can make-up those 4,000 words - heck maybe even make them better, then by all means. Keep going.

Otherwise. I'm not going to say stop writing, but think about writing something else. Or work on another part of the novel - skip to the end or something. Do this so you don't get frustrated, so you can keep the inspiration going and you're not dwelling on the work you lost.

Also, if you knew you had a wonky laptop and risked losing your work why aren't you backing it up regularly? I back up every page - that's about every 600 words.

Remember that NaNoWriMo is for you. It doesn't really matter to anyone else if you make it to 50,000 words. Yeah, we all support each other and pat each other on the back at the end of the month but that's about it. So do what you can, pull out all the stops and if you make it to 50,000 then YOU can feel proud that you won despite losing 4,000 words. Or make it to 46,000 words and be proud of that and then plug away on december 1st and 2nd to finish the novel.

Sorry if this isn't the happy hugsy response you were looking for. Trust me, I've lost enough work in my day to understand the frustration. I also have lost enough work to know that I can't trust computers or people or cats and need to back up regularly. So start again or start something else and learn from your mistake.
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