I hardly ever use the drafts feature on Everything2. I usually write everything I write in one go. By chance, I had started a writeup a few days ago, and went back to it, and after writing a few more paragraphs, resubmitted it. Or thought I did--- Ooops!, it seems that everything I wrote was lost.
A draft consists of two things. A draft, which is the saved thing you see, and a buffer, where you write. When you submit, you submit the draft, and the buffer is lost. You are supposed to save your buffer back into the draft, at which point you can then submit it. So if the draft is A, the buffer is B, and the displayed writeup is C. You can go from B to A, or A to C, but you can not go from B to C.
This was not intuitive to me, because the buffer looks a lot like the buffer in a normal, real writeup creation process, where you can, after writing, go from B to C (from buffer to published writeup). So the interface and format looks the same, which conceals the fact that it is not the same thing. There were, to be fair, warnings that I would lose things, but I didn't know that they would be lost totally: I just thought they would show up in the published writeup. Instead, all my progress was lost, like tears in the rain
I will never use the so-called "drafts" feature again, which is (in a Sartrean sense) slimy, and which is definitely a very bourgeois feature on E2.