ASCII what did it do and how can I fix it?

[Gingerbread]

Please, help! I was working on a book I'm writing. I needed to restart my computer before continuing. After saving the document and restarting, I opened OpenOffice Writer and then opened my file. I was greeted with an ASCII page that I'd never seen before. I searched through the options, but none of it made sense to me. I finally clicked one and hit okay.
My whole 26 page story had changed into 7 pages of pound signs (#). I'm confused and really scared I've lost this file for good. Please, someone, what can I do?

[RoryOF]

See this thread

22 pages term paper replaced with pound signs

Edit: I think the above thread best meets the case. Hagar suggests the following thread:

Files open in Writer instead of Calc

My advice is to start rewriting - the only consolation is that a rewrite is often better than the first draft.

You were possibly too speedy in your restart. OpenOffice files take longer to generate and write than plain text files.

[Gingerbread]

I've never had a corrupt file before! What happened to my book. This stuff is my life my memory sucks. I need to know if this will be a constant occurrence.

[RoryOF]

As I said above, you probably restarted your computer too speedily after saving the file. OpenOffice files are complex and take a few seconds longer to write. I regularly write/edit large files and have never lost a file in 8 years of using OpenOffice; that said, I still make regular backups (morning and evening if minor work, hourly if intensive work). The few extra seconds taken to allow a file to write and hardware/software buffers to clear, before closedown, are a lot less than the time and stress in rewriting a damaged or corrupt file.

[John_Ha]

If you are lucky you might be able to un-delete some of the temporary files which Writer wrote when you were editing the document. See Using RECUVA to recover Writer temporary files for how to do it.

These may also be useful.

Using 7-ZIP

Inside an odt file

Hints on how to prevent it happening

Another on RECUVA

If this solves the problem, please edit your original post title to [Solved].