NaNoWriMo 2020!

[zakk]

This year I

was

gonna do NaNoWriMo.
Was.
But then the flashdrive which my novel is on--a novel I've been working on for

over eight years

--decided now would be a BRILLIANT time to malfunction. If any backup of the flashdrive exists, it's literally years old.
The good news: As far as NOTES for my novel go, I was compiling them all in a word doc. I didn't manage to get them all (I lost at least three or four word doc files), but I was able to get the vast majority of my notes down. Combined with me generally having a good idea for my chronology in my novel (I have a fair understanding of what happens, when, with what events), and this is a reasonably decent place to be.

The bad news: I don't have any surviving draft of the first draft (which contains what I wrote start to finish the first time 'round). I don't have any surviving draft of my last second draft (which got approximately 2/5ths of the way through the entire novel yet contained loosely a fair approximation of all my content). I DEFINITELY don't have the third draft, which was my most recent draft and the draft I was going to start/resume working on.

So this year I'm probably not going to short of a miracle.
My mom gave me a fair amount of potential recovery methods to sift through, although honestly some of them look a bit...
...Sketchy to say the least and I'd just rather send it to a professional to see if they can fix it even though their prognosis is grim. (The flashdrive malfunctioned, and thus, windows is refusing to recognize it. Because of this, the only way to get a fix is to actually send the drive in.) Which could potentially be expensive. I'm not sure. Even as far as professionals go, there's lots of options and it's just kinda...overwhelming.

I just want to have my novel back.

this post is a novel