Yesterday morning, it was storming in Wales. And our power blinked out. Just for a moment. A second really. But enough to crash my computer. When it came back, the thousand-plus words – brilliant ones, too – were gone. GONE! Do you understand gone?
It is one of the most frustrating things that a writer can face. To invest yourself, your time, your talent, into writing something and then it disappears.
This is not the first time this has happened to me, though. You’d think I’d learn by now. And I thought I had. I ‘thought’ all my stuff was backing up automatically to my cloud. Pretty reliable, right?
Except when my personal techie guru woke up, Alan showed me that there is this little icon in the upper left-hand corner that turns auto-save off and on. Guess which one this story had somehow ended up on? That’s right – OFF!
So, a beautifully touching scene between a father and his newborn daughter was lost. Of course, it was not really. Oh, no, it was not retrievable off my computer.
But it was from my brain. Of course, I was too frustrated yesterday to rewrite the damned thing. I will today or tomorrow, though.
Like I said, this is NOT the first time this has happened to me. And a thousand words is nothing compared to fifteen or twenty-five-thousand. Almost half a book. That is what happened to me a few times.
I used to believe that both NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and Sergeant Mike’s Miracle Tour were cursed.
My first NaNo was also my first experience with the pain and trauma of losing a project. I was re-writing and modernizing Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. A pretty ambitious undertaking for a ‘porn’ writer. I was less than a week into NaNo when somehow or the other the screen of my laptop got broken. I could see nothing to retrieve my files. Yes, I know, now Alan could do that in five minutes or less. But back then, neither I nor my ex was that tech-savvy.
It was a couple more years before I found the courage to attempt NaNo again. This time on my beloved Sergeant Mike. I was fifteen-thousand words, about halfway through Labor’s End when the disk I saving it on got corrupted. This time I was a bit more with it. I knew that sometimes the experts could retrieve stuff you thought you had lost. I even sent this one away to a guy who promised he would not charge if he could not retrieve it. Well, the good news is I paid nothing for it. The bad news was even he could not salvage it.
The next time I attempted NaNo, I had a plan. No more losing my work. I not only saved to my hard drive and a disk, but I also posted each chapter to both Literotica and FetLife. I was not losing that puppy, and I did not.
Of course, the moment that the cloud came along, I was on it. I pay Microsoft each month for the privilege of my OneDrive, but what the hell, a couple of quid for life is worth it. Especially as Alan assures me that short of a global apocalypse the data is safe. Evidently, they save the data on several servers around the globe for just that reason. If one place experiences a natural or man-made disaster and goes down then they have duplicates in another part of the world. Hell, yeah, I’ll pay £1.99 for that privilege.
But as I f^cking discovered yesterday, even that does not work if it is turned off. Just a fair warning to those other tech-idiots like me out there.
So, what story was I working on, you ask?
One Night Stand. Yes, there is more to that one. But it is Book 3 in what I am tentatively calling Trouble Texas Style. I am also working to edit and complete Book 1 – Night Walker’s Woman and Book 2, Tight Fittin’ Jeans.
Yes, I may be a bit behind on my #1Mwordsin2020 goal, but I have written over 100,000 words so far this year. Including my other blogs. If you’re interested in those…
HomeCrazzyHome has returned to its original FrugalFam roots of sustainable living. Right now, I am focusing on our DIY wedding. Each Wednesday, I am highlighting a project that I am working on for the wedding. So far, I have done the invites. This week it is the crocheted bride’s maids’ bouquets. Then, next, I’ll show you an even easier option for fabric flowers that I am using for corsage and boutonnieres.
Transcendental Ramblings is my highbrow, fifty-cent word retake on my Transcendentalist roots. I examine and somewhat interpret the works of the great Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and feminist pioneer Margaret Fuller. I began in the new year with the one Transcendentalist piece that I believe everyone should read – Civil Disobedience by Thoreau. This classic essay is only sixteen pages long but has been credited by Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela with inspiring their non-violent protests. Each Thursday, I look at a section of it, dissect it, put it in historical context, then draw any modern parallels of which there are sadly too many.
If that ain’t enough, The Feminist-Homemaker is my own contribution to the feminist and the goddess movement. After struggling for most of my life to reconcile my choice to be a homemaker, mother, and carer with feminism, this blog follows my journey to self-actualizing those seemingly incongruent roles. As well as throwing in some practical homemaking stuff along the way.
Yes, I know that is a lot and a diverse set of things. But surprisingly not as dissonant as you would think. You will find many of those same themes hidden and sometimes in your face within my fiction works as well.
Speaking of which, I suppose it is time, I finish off here and get back to retrieving that scene from the one hard drive that is relatively reliable, at least on this sort of thing. Isn’t it funny that I can walk into the pantry and completely forget what I needed there, but can vividly recall, if not word for word, then definitely the basics of whole books?
And if you’re wondering when I’ll ever get around to posting this sh^t to Literotica, I need to finish Night Walker’s Woman before doing either of the others. But those are almost simultaneous. And I may post them that way.
But until then, there is plenty of stuff on my Lit profile and my blogs to keep you happy, I hope.
Tara Cox - Literary Erotica 