Note to self...

...don't publish blog posts at midnight after an 11 hour day at work.  You might get sidetracked and forget the primary reason for the post.

A few years back, I wrote a short piece entitled "One Night Only".  I was never really satisfied with the ending, but I also never really found the motivation or inspiration to fix it.  So the story sat in a folder on a flash drive, awaiting a future purpose.

Then the flash drive was lost.  It contained edits on one of my novel pieces, along with "final" versions of all of my short story work.  I was devastated - especially in the case of the novel work, where I had begun editing portions straight to the computer.  My hard copy backup didn't contain most of these edits, which were now gone forever.

Now, the losses weren't complete.  According to most people I know, I'm "old school".  I still actually write - by hand with a pen or pencil.  I typically don't hit the computer with a piece until it is completely written and has gone through a preliminary editing process.  So I had at least a preliminary paper version of almost all of the stories on the departed drive.

But apparently a funny thing happened on the way to complete backup safety.

See, a few months ago I began submitting pieces to contests and publishers again.  An opportunity caught my eye for an anthology being put together by a publishing outfit called Anchala Studios.  As I read it, I thought to myself that "One Night Only" was the perfect piece for submission, as long as I fixed the ending.  So, I dug out my folders and binders to find my paper copy.  Which somehow was missing a page.

The second page.  The original ending.

Thus forcing a complete re-write of the end of the piece.

As I type this, Anchala Studios is putting the finishing touches on the anthology, which will contain the updated version of "One Night Only".

I guess sometimes things just work out.