Striking distance

Last October I hit the 80k mark on "Confessions", only to lose eight thousand words after a data loss that was entirely the result of my own laziness and stupidity. Now, after getting back on the horse after that painful fall, I'm about fifteen hundred words away from reaching that milestone yet again. At the time I lost what amounted to an entire season of hard-won writing, one of my best friends - a writer himself - attempted to console me by mentioning that Tolkein would at times throw out entire sections of the Lord of the Rings as he worked on it, and invariably found the second or third iterations much better than the first. While in fact my own experience in re-writing the past chapter of the novel seems to bear out Tolkein's observation, all things being equal I'd still rather have the original 8k back!