So we got an older but very well-maintained and working PC from my wife's place of work recently. It has a decent processor and enough memory to adequately run XP.
It also has a floppy drive.
So, for no reason whatsoever I was rummaging through a box of old floppy disks, one of which was labeled, "Text Files." On this disk, I found a manuscript that has the fist 60 pages of a story I started writing when I was in college. Afterward, life prohibited me from taking it any further but I always kept a copy...just in case. Well, about a year ago I had not one but TWO hard drives crash on me within a day of each-other. I was devastated because everything I'd written over two decades was on those drives, my primary and my backup. I lost most of it but most of it was crap anyway. I was, however, grief-stricken over losing the first three chapters of the book I'm currently writing, the first 15 pages of another story called "Dirty Secret" and a sci-fi story I started writing in 1991 on a computer that ran DOS.
Well, before resorting to slitting my wrists with the edge of the computer's chassis, I remembered that the chapters and treatments for two current projects had been saved to my iPod. Said iPod died the day after I recovered the files. Thin threads, eh? These books WILL be successful, I have no doubt, and losing them would have been devastating. Talk about death of a dream...
So I'm reading through the sci-fi story that had been left in cryo-sleep for two decades and remembering writing it and thinking it was good 20 years ago. Oh, how my writing has changed. Ugh! I think the story is solid but beginning on page 1 again will be necessary... after I finish the other two. It's nice to have some built-in inspiration, though. It'lll move the process along faster when the time comes.
It also has a floppy drive.
So, for no reason whatsoever I was rummaging through a box of old floppy disks, one of which was labeled, "Text Files." On this disk, I found a manuscript that has the fist 60 pages of a story I started writing when I was in college. Afterward, life prohibited me from taking it any further but I always kept a copy...just in case. Well, about a year ago I had not one but TWO hard drives crash on me within a day of each-other. I was devastated because everything I'd written over two decades was on those drives, my primary and my backup. I lost most of it but most of it was crap anyway. I was, however, grief-stricken over losing the first three chapters of the book I'm currently writing, the first 15 pages of another story called "Dirty Secret" and a sci-fi story I started writing in 1991 on a computer that ran DOS.
Well, before resorting to slitting my wrists with the edge of the computer's chassis, I remembered that the chapters and treatments for two current projects had been saved to my iPod. Said iPod died the day after I recovered the files. Thin threads, eh? These books WILL be successful, I have no doubt, and losing them would have been devastating. Talk about death of a dream...
So I'm reading through the sci-fi story that had been left in cryo-sleep for two decades and remembering writing it and thinking it was good 20 years ago. Oh, how my writing has changed. Ugh! I think the story is solid but beginning on page 1 again will be necessary... after I finish the other two. It's nice to have some built-in inspiration, though. It'lll move the process along faster when the time comes.