I'm SO Mad At Myself!

I could seriously kick myself!!!!  For the first time EVER since I started writing, I screwed up royally!  I am dumber than I previously thought.  Much dumber...  Kicking myself again and once more...

I do my writing in MS Word, and when the manuscript starts to take shape, I print it out, grab a red pen and write in revisions, all kinds of revisions - to plot, character, dialogue - and do some editing and corrections as well.

I finally had enough of the new Sasha book written to print it out and get busy with the red pen.  Then I got onto the computer and input all the revisions on the Word file.

I spent about twelve hours working on it yesterday.  

I just opened the file tonight and realized immediately that something was wrong... The word count is considerably LESS today that it was last night.  

I did not save my changes!

On top of that, last night I took out the garbage and recycling, so all those printed pages, with all that red ink are now long gone.

I have no idea how I managed to do (or rather, NOT do) that.  About twelve hours worth of work and creativity are gone.  Damn.  I am such an idiot.

** Spare me the "You should have...." comments.  I already know what you're going to say and I've said it to myself already.