I’m still banging my head against the desk as a result of something very stupid I did earlier today. I was working on assembling my preliminary table of contents for the zombie anthology and inadvertently lost a bunch of data.

I’ve got a spreadsheet setup in Excel, which listed title, author, original publication, and word count. I wanted to add another column for year of publication, so I could see the range of the age of the stories on my shortlist. In doing so, I attempted to move a column as I added the new one…and somehow deleted the word count column…and didn’t notice until like an hour later, at which point it was way too late to undo that mistake.

ARGH! (Note that’s the cry of anguish, not the piratesque Arrr!) Of all the columns of data to lose, that’s absolutely the worst one. Any of the others would have been super easy to fix (except maybe for title), but word count…gah. That’s one of the most time-consuming sort of administrative activities associated with putting together a reprint anthology. I am not looking forward to starting over from scratch. And all indications are that there’s no way to recover that data from some autosaved file hidden on my hard drive somewhere.