‘Every writer’s worst nightmare’: What next after losing a manuscript?
Then he sought consolation in stories of other writers who’d suffered the same fate.By Gary NunnJuly 25, 2026SaveYou have reached your maximum number of saved items.Remove items from your saved list to add more.ShareAAAThis story is part of the July 25 edition of Good Weekend. See all stories.It’s every writer’s worst nightmare, one that gives them cold sweats in the dead of night: losing all their written work, with no chance of recovery. I’d spent 12 months writing my second book proposal, and was just days away from submitting the document containing everything my agent needed to pitch to publishers, including the first chapters.
- ▪Then he sought consolation in stories of other writers who’d suffered the same fate.By Gary NunnJuly 25, 2026SaveYou have reached your maximum number of saved items.Remove items from your saved list to add more.ShareAAAThis story is part of
- ▪See all stories.It’s every writer’s worst nightmare, one that gives them cold sweats in the dead of night: losing all their written work, with no chance of recovery.
- ▪I’d spent 12 months writing my second book proposal, and was just days away from submitting the document containing everything my agent needed to pitch to publishers, including the first chapters.
Sydney Morning Herald publishes from Australia and files mainly under world. We currently carry 3,705 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/national/every-writer-s-worst-nightmare-what-next-after-losing-a-manuscript-20260422-p5zpz7.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:00:00 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-25T03:05:14.364Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-25T03:05:14.364Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xYWyK75vAC0t |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.