Word of Advice to Writers

If you're a writer like me who prefers to type their work, I have a piece of advice for you. Never, ever, ever, ever simply type your work into something on the internet (such as a blog post, or a poetry post form on AllPoetry). I guess I'm violating that right now, but this is not a story or poem so it's alright. Always, always type first into Word and obsessively CTRL+S. If possible, do this while hooked up to an external hard drive. And save to that external as soon as you finish. I know computers are unreliable, but the internet is even more so. I had learned this lesson before after losing some poems, but I ignored it yesterday, as I happily spent 3 hours typing up a story - into LiveJournal (God knows why I decided to use LJ instead of Blogger - I don't think I would've had such a problem on Blogger). It was autosaving often, and so I felt fine. I was getting ready to go to dinner so I stopped at a stopping point and pressed Publish. It said it published successfully. Always one to check, I clicked 'view entry now.' There it was - the first paragraph of my story. Nothing else. An entire day's work - all gone. Now, on Blogger the autosave automatically makes a draft. Not so on LJ. You have to manually create a draft by clicking 'save'. And I hadn't done that. Of course not. I haven't yet rewritten the story - but you can bet I'll be writing it in Microsoft Word. It almost makes me paranoid enough to make me want to write by hand, but I haven't done that in forever and know it takes far too long. Ah well, c'est la vie.