And the Moral of this Story Is...

I decided, New Year - new agent blitz. So during the week I sent queries out to seven agents. By late last night, I'd received one rejection (didn't sound like the kind of thing they would rep), three requests for partials and one request for the full.

OMG. The full!! I'd still got about 60 pages left to final polish and edit when that came through, so I spent all today with head down, butt in chair madly finishing it off.

All was going well (this ms has had several edits so far...!) until I hit the final chapter. And it had the wrong ending.

You know that feeling when you're on the rollercoaster, when the little car perches perilously before free falling into that death defying plunge? That was how my stomach felt as I realised that at some point in the past I'd saved the wrong bloody version of my book.

I sat there for about one whole minute just staring at the screen thinking, umm noooo, I couldn't have been so stupid... but in the end I had to close the document and search through all the nooks and crannies in my computer.

Nada. Zilch. At this point I might had said a rude word. Or two.

I then looked through my flash drive but again, I'd stupidly saved the previous version. ARGH.

Eventually, after much hair pulling (and watering of the eyes) I discovered a lone version tucked away on one of my off-the-planet email accounts. YAY! Relieved? I'll say.

So what have I learned from this? Well, it's that no matter how often I save my docs, the one that gets away is always the one that is desperately needed at some point in the future. This is the reason I'm a hoarder! And quite obviously, I don't hoard nearly enough!!