All I want for Christmas . . .

Hello all! I'm back. Actually, I never left, but sorry that I haven't blogged for a month. You all must have missed me so much, right? Right? *pokes your arm*

Well, this last month has been kind of crazy for me. I had finals up to the second week of December and passed all of my classes. Can you believe I survived my first semester of college? Yeah, me neither.

And then, my life changed dramatically one night. I was typing away on my laptop, working on a new story I'd thought of. It was one of those things where I just had to get it down on paper (or laptop, in my case). So when I was finished writing about the first-ish chapter of this new book I went to save my work and guess what? It wouldn't save. My flash drive was dead. Dead. Kaput. No more. I didn't really think much of it at the time. I thought maybe it was tired of being plugged into my computer. So I went to sleep, thinking it would be all better in the morning. But it wasn't. This is when I started freaking out a bit. All of my books, stories, ideas, characters, outlines, EVERYTHING, was on that flash drive. All of it. And then it was suddenly gone.

So, I went to the geek squad. They told me it was dead, was getting no power to it whatsover. The nice geeky guy I talked to told me he could send it off to a special lab to recover my data for a minimum of $699.99. Did you catch that? MINIMUM of SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS! I'm a college student. I can't afford to pay seven hundred dollars for anything, even if it is my life.

Thus I went home and sulked. Hundreds of hours of my life gone. The Elements, gone. Slim or Bust, gone. Elora, gone. Ideas, gone. Gone. . . :(

But! After sulking I decided it wasn't so bad. I had the Elements saved on a cd that I'd given to my mom and sister. It just wasn't as edited and nice as the one on my flash drive. Slim or Bust was saved on my laptop from when I had switched over from the home computer to my laptop. It wasn't as far along as the one on my flash drive, but I could work from where it had been left off. Elora . . . Well, that just sucked. Elora is my new project that I'm absolutely in love with. It's like fire just struck with that idea. But I only had that saved on my flash drive. So it was gone for good. And as for my ideas, I have plenty of ideas.

So, being my optimistic self, I got back to work. I began editing the Elements that was on my computer, working from where I'd left off on my other stories, writing scenes from books to come. It felt good to get back into the Elements again. But I still never gave up hope that my information on my flash drive might be recovered. If I saved the flash drive, some sort of technology would eventually be invented to enable people to get my information back for less than seven hundred dollars, right?

One day when I was searching on Google, I came across an add for A+ Perfect Computers. You should check out their website. It's pretty awesome.

This guy would get my information back for $145 and I would only have to pay him IF he got my stuff back. I had a really good feeling about this guy. He had great reviews, was a legitimate business, had success stories. So I decided to give it a shot. I sent my flash drive off to Connecticut and about four days later I got the call. They were able to recover all of my data! I was so happy! Honestly, I couldn't stop smiling and I think I must have thanked the secretary who called me about three or four hundred times.

All in all, it cost me a little less than $200 to get my information back. But that is a price I gladly paid. To have all my hard work back in my hands and be able to work on it again makes me so grateful. I did learn my lesson though. Flash drives are not where you save important documents. That's what your hard drive is for and that's why you back-up your files. (And, can I just say, I still don't know how to back-up my files. Ryan, a little help?) Flash drives are for transportation only. And I will never make that mistake again.

So, since we're all so happy I got my stuff back, I'm going to give you all a little taste of my work. Aren't you so excited?! No, I don't blame you for not being. But I just felt like showing you a little bit of what I've been doing with my life. So, here is the first chapter of Elora. :)

One Chapter for Blog