I finished my book. I don’t mean it’s ready to publish, but I have it done enough that I have made a PDF and corresponding dead trees version for my wife to proofread and an eBook copy for my own reading process for when I’m commuting. I was excited to be on the home stretch, to be honest. I was excited to pick up my little Kindle Fire tablet and start reading my own book this morning on the train at 6:30am.
And read, I did. I read, highlighted, made correction comments, and I loved doing it. It was a good mix of easy to hold for reading and trivial to comment and highlight for noting changes to be made. And there were quite a few changes to make.
This afternoon on the train, about fifteen minutes into my last leg of commuting for the day, simply turning the page made the screen of my Kindle go dark and the damned thing rebooted. When it finished its “oopsie” process, I found two things that I really wish I hadn’t. First, my book was not present on the Kindle. Second, all of my roughly two hours of reading, highlighting, and correcting was irretrievably lost. Since I have the cheapo Kindle with no cellular network connection, and since I hadn’t bothered to connect it to WiFi at work during the day, there was no crucial “sync.”
Goddammit to hell! I am so pissed at whatever or whoever is responsible for my loss of data.
At least now I can go more quickly through the same parts over again — having some memory of what I did should make it easier to do again. But shit. What a waste of time.