By Deborah Bier, the near ex-publisher and ex-editor of the almost former Concord Magazine
This edition of the Concord Magazine almost didn't happen. In mid-August, I had about half of the articles finished and ready for proofing. I had most of the artwork set up and ready to go for the rest of the articles. I hadn't uploaded anything yet to the web because Google picks up these unpublished pieces in a heartbeat and I didn't want them to be found yet.
Then for some unknown reason the entire folder with the new edition ended up in my computer's trash. Now, I have some safeguards to prevent this, but it happened anyway. Totally inexplicable. I emptied the trash before I realized the horror of what would happen.
It turns out, in the current edition of the Macintosh OSX -- version 5.3.5 -- when you empty the trash, there seems to be no recovery program that can reconstruct its contents. IT WAS ALL GONE.
I nearly decided to just never publish again. I was a hair's breadth from it, but decided to sleep on it first.
Oh, had I mentioned that our automated, nightly backups to an external hard drive had been failing but the system hadn't been notifying me? The latest backup I had was about two weeks old and didn't include ANY of the work I had done on this issue. Though much of the artwork I'd been gathering for years was in files ready to be used. And I had a couple of raw, unedited articles on hand.
But hey, so what: I was going to kill the Concord Magazine...what did it matter?
Well, the next day TWO authors sent me articles they had promised. And there were others who I knew had already sent work specifically written for the ezine. And yet others who were already in mid-article. I felt like a heel.
So I decided to redo the lost work. Since it had been so recently completed, even MY brain could remember much of what I had done. And it turned out it went maybe 80% faster than the first time around...much to my great and pleasant surprise.
So, that's the story. I don't know how to prevent the original disaster from happening again because I don't know how it occurred in the first place. But we DO have this new edition of the ezine.
And the moral of this dark tale is...well, I don't really know. I always thought we were pretty slick because we did nightly backups -- so many individuals and businesses NEVER backup their data. Maybe if I had ALSO been doing off-site backups maybe I would have had a copy of the lost work. Maybe if every night I had put the work on a teeny, tiny data key and tied it to a homing pigeon, it would have flown off to someone a distance away for safekeeping.
Maybe the moral of the story is that even with the best of intent and good planning, things happen entirely out of our control. Sometimes, these events change the course of our lives.
Or sometimes, we just have to learn to accept our trials with as much grace as possible. Grieve a little, think things over, and then go back out into the world to do as close to the right thing as we can imagine.
I do hope you find this issue turns out to be the right thing.
Artwork: Could you just FAINT from the beauty of this ginkgo leaf background? Ok, so ginkgo are NOT native trees, but sometimes we just have to loosen up, ok? Created by Word of Mouth Web Design. Cartoons courtesy of Art Today.
