Side Story Delay

Hey, let's have a short story here, but not the short story we're looking for. 

Instead of any of the good news I've been waiting to share with you, I've only got some bad ones to share at this juncture.

There was a foolish author who thought he planned ahead and wrote the short story he intended to publish in March already in February. Then he would only have to do a bit of polishing on the week before the D-day and chill.

Well, on the week before the D-day, which is now, I, the foolish author, discovered that the USB drive containing the draft for the story had become corrupt. 

I rely on flash drives to move my projects between multiple devices, namely my writing laptop and desktop, or wherever else I happen to go.

I've heard horror stories about external drives' tendency to break, but this has never happened to me before. My oldest UBS drive has served faithfully for 14+ years and still works without any issues. 

In fact, I'd already fallen under the blissful assumption that unless you dropped them in a bath, or drove over them with a car, or something they could last technically forever. I do make regular backups of active projects and save a copy on every device—well, except just this once.

Murphy's law wouldn't miss the opportunity.

Ironically, it was the newest USB drive I had, barely two years old, which kicked the bucket. 

More ironically still, there was nothing else on the stick but my complete latest work, Side Story C: The Chapel of Sleep, due for release next Monday. 

I had picked a fresh drive specifically so that it wouldn't fail due to overuse or anything.

R.I.P.

I tried every trick in the book, CHKDSK, TestDisk, etc, ran a solid dozen recommended file recovery software, but every attempt ended in the same merciless result.

The drive's too broken to even be formatted.

Nothing could be salvaged. All the data is gone forever.

There were no backups. Temp folder empty.

No alternative copies.

Gone.

You know what that means. Without time travel technology, there is only one possible option left.

Yes, that's right.

I'm going to have to rewrite the whole story from zero.

Thankfully we're only talking about a short story here. 

The draft was barely 15,000 words. I spent "only" about two weeks on it. It could've been the draft of the next mainline story (currently 120,000+ words). Had the latter happened, I would've gone and jumped off a bridge, and not sit here cracking bad jokes about it. 

But still, I'm still not smiling. This is a particularly galling setback for me, because I felt I managed to put a lot of good things on those pages, and am not so confident I can reproduce everything from memory. Well, no choice but to try.

tl;dr: as the cherry on the big irony cake, I'm going to have to delay the release of Side Story C, right after previously monologing about how absolutely embarrassing it is to delay projects. A case in point. 

I can't afford to poke fun at CDProject Red again.

Well, I hope you at least got a smile out of all this and aren't terribly bothered by my "dog ate my homework"-tier explanation.

I believe a lot of alcoholic goods will be consumed once this is safely over. But until it is safely done, I'll just get back to the keyboard. Hell, I'll make the story better than it was.

Anyway, for now, please accept my sincerest apologies for the upcoming delay.

Someone also decided to put this thing called Easter next week, which throws another wrench in my plans with its associated happenings, but I'll do my best to get the story out as soon as its properly finished again. And no compromises on the quality.

Thank you for understanding!

Hopefully better news next time!

Have a pleasant day!