For anyone unaware of what is happening I have recently gone through a change of computers. Wednesday before last I got up and hit the power button on my computer as I usually do. It didn’t start. I hit it again with the same results. Of course at this point the panic started to set in. I had some of my work backed up on a thumb drive, but not all of it. Call me old fashioned but I never really trusted cloud storage for backing up my work.
Long story short I purchased a new computer, using my CC which I didn’t want to do, but what choice did I really have? Everything I had ever written was on that computer, as well as the covers I’ve designed in the past and piles of stock photos purchased over the years from various vendors.
To give you an idea of how much was there when I finally got my old computer running again and started transferring from my old to my new, there was over 1.5 gigs of writing in 1,036 files spread across 206 folders. The folder I use to hold covers was over 36 gigs. It took me a good week to get everything transferred over.
I’m the kind of writer who can’t work on just one thing. I’m currently knee deep, about 55,000 words into The Bad Place, a story that loosely continues the saga of Sheriff Paul Odenton who appeared in Cursed (I was warned not to use that title as it would get lost, but I’m stubborn that way. One of these days I’ll change that to The Witch of Porter Mines.)and the second book of my trilogy titled Parasite. I’m a sucker for one word titles.
I know if I could focus on just one work at a time I’d be a hell of a lot more productive.
I am also working on and off on an interesting little tale I call Bitter Hollow, that stands at just 50,000 words. I worry I’m not talented enough to complete it the way I see the ending in my mind.
Then there’s Lair of the Broken Queen, book six of my post apocalyptic series This Lawless Land. I stopped at around 45,000 words as I wasn’t really feeling the story though I know exactly how the series will end. I’m torn between making this the last chapter of the saga, or adding a seventh book.
It was this last one that caused me the most pain. As I’m transferring everything over using thumb drives I begin to notice that not everything is coming over as it should. Folders half empty and such. One piece of work that vanished was Lair of the Broken Queen. All I had left was the rough outline I wrote back when I started the book two years ago.
I’ve been through this before, in 2001 I lost everything with a hard drive failure that wiped out over ten years of work in the blink of an eye. Tried having it recovered, but no one could help me. I’ve recreated a lot of the work through memory. My Cursed file was one that vanished and I rewrote the book from memory.
I have spent the past week poring through my files looking for the missing work. Imaging my relief when I find out I inadvertently saved the file under a different name.
I’ve bought a number of 64gig thumb drives I’ll use to back up my more important files. I just hope that if and when it happens again, technology has not moved on to the point the thumb drive is useless. Of course the second question would be, will I be around to see it happen. At 66 I’ve entered that stage of life where you have more time behind you than ahead. But that’s a subject for another time and place. Now that I’ve gotten this mess straightened out I can move forward once again.
Richard Schiver 
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