Like many another no-talent, I have been writing a novel for years. Precisely how many has slipped my mind. For months at a stretch, I do not compose a single new paragraph or edit an old one. My authorship is, to say the least, sporadic.

      For whatever it’s worth, I do think about it quite often. In my head, I write and re-write, but when time comes to convert energy back to matter, the heart falls and the nerve fails. With no final chapter on the horizon, I occasionally consider abandoning the project altogether. The road more traveled is still the one of least resistance.

      So how was I to know that my anti-Muse, peevish on her best days and just short of deaf on any day, as far as I can tell, to constant pleas for inspiration, would suddenly be all ears to these innocent grumblings born of frustration? If she had been unco-operative to date, she was making ready to outdo herself.

      One Sunday afternoon, unsuspecting as a lamb, I sat down at my PC, plucked the red-bordered disk from among its fellows in the plastic, flip-top box, and inserted it into the A-drive. After much switch-throwing, button-pushing and mouse-clicking, I patiently waited for the chapter titles, each being a separate file, to pop up. And waited. And waited.

      No chapters.

      Puzzled, I repeated the process. Still no files. I examined the disk to make sure I had the right one. There was the title plainly penciled on the label, same as always. I logged completely off and started again from scratch. Nothing doing.

      I could not retrieve my work.

      For the remains of the day, my thoughts and emotions were, ah, busy arranging themselves. I began to experience that slippery, nebulous sensation visited upon those who, the morning after Election Day, realize that all their candidates lost, from president all the way down to dogcatcher.

      By Monday morning, this relatively mild gateway distress was losing ground to the hard core stuff. Like a grieving mother elephant who carries her dead infant’s body around, I tucked the disk into my briefcase when I left for work. That way, I could make myself feel even worse by staring at it from time to time while contemplating the imbecility of no backup. The effort of many years, such as it was, had been vaporized, sucked into an electronic black hole by the evil, evil gods of data processing.

      Many will shake their heads at the alacrity with which I assumed the worst, but it doesn’t take much to spook a born pessimist. To me, every swell on the surface is a tsunami waiting to happen. If I had a family crest, the motto would read "Weep first and ask questions later."

      Did Victor Hugo, whose housemaid accidentally burned the only manuscript of one of his novels, throw in the towel so soon? Did Margot Kidder, who spent the better part of three years writing her autobiography only to have her laptop eat it whole, take it lying down? Of course not. Hugo dedicated himself to re-writing the entire thing, and Kidder treated herself to a well-deserved, class-A nervous breakdown, both intelligent responses as I see them. Unfortunately, I could not seem to profit from either example. When considering option number one, I never knew whether to laugh or cry, and option number two, strive though I might, kept eluding me.

      Nowadays, every enterprise on the globe – industrial, educational, governmental, charitable and criminal – is in thrall to computer experts, and where I work is no different. My desk happens to be quite near their area, and throughout those first bleak days, I dully watched them come and go, hardly caring what went on around me. But by midweek, a pinprick of light began to pierce the gloom.

      Everyone knows those computer types aren’t really human, I reminded myself, but extraterrestrials cloned in galaxies far, far away and then sent here to assume our identities and colonize earth for their dying planets. They look harmless but can levitate Jeep Grand Cherokees in their sleep. Everyone knows that. Tech Support is just a cover.

      Disk in hand, I gained admittance to their secured area (which further supports my allegation, if anyone still doubts) and calmly articulated my dilemma.

      "MY HON-EY BAY-BEE!!! Deh…deh…deh…DEADDDDDDDD!!! I’LL PAY ANYTHING!!! Bring her BAAAAAAACK!!! Pul-LEEEEEEEEEEEZE!!!!!

      But in spite of my eloquence, Tom and Dina eventually got the gist and said they’d look into it. Before long, they had snatched mediocrity from the jaws of its just deserts, and material I had thought lost forever reappeared, albeit with file names resembling the Polish alphabet. I received a gentle talking-to about the care and feeding of disks: unlike diamonds, they are not forever, deteriorate over time, must never be placed near anything magnetic, including telephones(!),should always be backed up (no bull), etc. etc., all of which I took very much to heart and promised faithfully to observe in future.

      For the present, however, my superstitious frame of mind regarding all this continued unabated, and I would not tempt fate further. As I saw it, my disk liked the computers at work better than the one at home, and I must make the most of it. I stayed past quitting time to print out chapter after chapter until I had them all and then deposited them in a dowdy brown folder tied shut with string.

      That evening, I made my way home like a student driver with a load of nitro. I chose the least congested routes, constantly scanned for potholes and never got above 30 mph. I knew, just knew, that some eighteen-wheeler with my name on it would come around the bend any minute. As the police cruisers and ambulances and wreckers and firetrucks and all their light-flashing kin form a circle around the disaster, there I would be, immobile on a stretcher, semi-conscious but unable to speak. Both disks, original and copy, have been catapulted into a field where they will be found and chewed up by a dog. As they lift me into the EMS van, I am desperately trying to say something, but to no avail. And as my eyes close into insensibility, the last sight they behold is the pages of my work, blowing, blowing in the wind, one after another, fluttering white sheets that seem to be waving "Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-byiiiieeee!"

      Still no good in a crisis.

      Regrettably, I have no sustained confidence in my literary abilities. But hope, like irony, lurks everywhere. As the printer was delivering my magnum opus, I scanned the lines and was surprised to feel a flicker of … something. I took up a pen and began to strike through a word here, add one there. Securing the pages and ordering the chapters prompted more tweaks, and it dawned on me that perhaps the episode had not been totally devoid of good points. I was forced to consider that it was mostly done, that perhaps only three or four chapters more would finish it.