OLD AND BUSTED: “On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Dog.”

The New Hotness? Jacqueline Wilson’s novel deleted by dog.

Dame Jacqueline Wilson has revealed she almost lost the manuscript of her most recent book after a friend’s dog pressed the “delete all” button on her computer screen.

In an advance on “the dog ate my homework”, Wilson faced telling her publisher that she would not be handing in her 300-page novel.

She recalled the experience during an appearance at the Oxford Literary Festival, telling the audience that it had left her very wary of technology.

The book was The Magic Faraway Tree: A Christmas Adventure, a reworking of the Enid Blyton tales, which was published in October.

The dedication in the front of the book – “To Gary Freemantle, the best technical wizard in the world, with many thanks” – is for the IT expert who managed to retrieve the manuscript.

“I’m not scared of most things but I am scared of my computer. I don’t like it and it doesn’t like me,” Wilson said.

“The most terrible thing happened. We were looking after other people’s dogs and I was being mad enough to try to type on a computer where they could get at me.

“This seems unbelievable but it happened: one dog pressed a button that said on it ‘delete’ and the other pressed ‘delete all’. My actual, almost-finished manuscript disappeared entirely.”

The key phrase is “almost,” fortunately. And it could be worse: As James Lileks once noted after one of his backup sessions, in a post that now appears to be offline, “I remember Anthony Burgess telling a story in an interview: he had finished a book and was heading off to the post office to mail it to his publisher, and a scooter sped by – the fellow on the back grabbed his satchel and they sped off through the Roman traffic. You might doubt the story, since it contains the phrase ‘sped off through the Roman traffic,’ but a scooter can fit between the cars. That was the only copy of his book. So he went home and wrote it again.”