Hunt for The Jabberwock Slayer

losing a Very Important document in digital space

My First Beta-Reader

When my daughter was home for the summer, I asked her to beta-read The Jabberwock Slayer, the first book in a fantasy trilogy I'm currently working on.

I have a few other beta readers lined up, but wanted my daughter to be the story’s first reader. I sent the manuscript to her on Google Drive so she could work on it over the summer. I'd have access to it when I had time to work on the next version.

It took a while for her to get started, but once she began reading it, I saw regular email notifications with various comments and suggestions from her. She finished the beta read and asked me when I was going to work on it.

“As soon as I have time.”

Within a week of her finishing the read, I entered a busy season with six online classes as well as working increased hours editing and doing content management for a client; I didn't have the mental space to tackle my novel.

My daughter asked me from time to time if I’d started working on it and I always told her I’d begin as soon as I had the mental space. I wanted to be able to concentrate and give it the attention it needs. Each time, I would tell her I appreciated the work she did on it and I'm looking forward to doing the fifth revision.

When working on my weekly schedule for January, I put “revising Jabberwock Slayer” in a couple of slots so I would actually start. Only a couple hours each week, but it's something.

Thursday, I was ready to launch into draft five, considering my daughter’s comments and suggestions.

My daughter is a talented writer. She has a solid grasp of what makes a good story, having been immersed in the world of story from a young age.

Having read hundreds of books—some of them again and again—good books by good writers, she knows what works in a story and what doesn't.

If she put her mind to it, she could excel at storytelling. At the moment, her focus is her studies, and her major is pre-law, but who knows what the future may hold? In any case, I’m happy she had the time to read my WIP over the summer.

The Search Begins

Thursday morning, I opened Google Drive and did a search—usually the quickest way to find anything—for “Jabberwock”. The only thing that appeared in my search was a document titled The Last Jabberwock. A rough draft I’d uploaded of the unfinished book three in the trilogy.

The Jabberwock Slayer didn't show up.

I narrowed my search and typed in “Jabberwock Slayer.”

Nothing.

I decided to broaden my search and looked for “slayer,” then “hunt.” No luck.

It wasn't quite time to panic yet. Maybe I downloaded the story onto my laptop and then deleted it from Google Drive. I went to the story’s folder on my computer. It had all the revisions of the story, up through draft four, but not the version with my daughter’s comments and suggestions.

I went over to the downloads folder and browsed it in case I downloaded it and didn’t file it in the right place.

Nothing.

Panic began to settle in.

I asked myself why I didn't download it, why I didn't save a copy of it. I thought about the hours my daughter spent on it, the comments and suggestions I know would be helpful.

Not just that, but how would I be able to tell her I lost the story she worked on for me? She would assume I thought it wasn’t valuable. And she'd have every right to think that. After all, she had worked on it months ago and I hadn’t even saved it to my computer.

Guilt overwhelmed me.

I wondered if maybe my daughter had accidentally deleted the file so did a quick online search to see if such a thing was possible. But no, I'm the owner of the document so only I could delete it.

I must have deleted it!

Google has been giving me warning messages for a while that my Google Drive is over 90% full—between emails and photos and documents—so I recently deleted a bunch of old emails and videos.

Had I accidentally deleted the story?