A lesson I first learned long ago when I was in the daily newspaper grind revisited me this week as I commenced editing the actual Word files comprising Microchip.

We’d been having heavy rain and severe thunderstorms all weekend due to Tropical Storm Debby, then on Tuesday and Wednesday the storms mostly subsided and we started getting tropical storm-force winds. I thought we were out of the woods as far as the possibility of losing power went — I don’t possess an uninterrupted power supply, unfortunately, for my home office — but I at least should have remembered the “save often” rule.

Well, the last time I shut down the computer was Monday night, so all the work I had done on the book on Tuesday and Wednesday was lost last night when the power went out for a few moments. That’s all it takes … when I later rebooted my Dell Inspiron 531S computer, a very reliable machine over the past 4 1/2 years, the “recover working files” function of the Oracle open-source software I’m using, Open Office, came up as usual and proceeded to retrieve the four files I had open at the time. Alas, with that brief loss of power, the record of all the changes I’d made in Chapters 2-5 was wiped out.

So, heavy sigh: That’s a good four hours of work that I’m going to need to repeat — hitting SAVE every five minutes, mind you — at my own expense.

New rule: Save all changes at the end of every chapter — or several times, at parts of the way through, in each longer chapter!

So this has been a costly reminder for me. But all’s not lost: Onward and upward.