Coming Less Soon - The Deep Tunnel
I don't know about you, but I frequently get told that nothing you write on a computer ever goes away; that short of smashing and burning a hard drive, "bad people" can always access your information.
Yeah, right.
I only have myself to blame for what follows, but... several months ago, I started work on The Deep Tunnel, the follow-up to my first novel, The Shifter's Trail. I plotted it out, wrote an outline, and started work, mostly keeping to my self-imposed target of at least 600 words a day. Andromeda and her friends started on their latest adventure. Day by day, the word count added up. Slowly at first: 652, 1,312. Then to more impressive totals: 10,111, 22,498. The project was going well. I got past 40,000 words and had entered what I think of as the "downhill" part of a novel, the part where you don't have to agonize about what happens next, because what happens next is the inevitable consequence of what you've already written. Even though it was still 20,000 plus words away, the end was in sight.
And then I lost it. All of it.
To this day, I don't know what happened. I opened my computer to start work and it had disappeared. I searched everywhere. No luck. I sent my drive to a vendor who specialized in retrieving lost, deleted, or corrupted files. No luck. The whole thing was gone.
Now, you might be asking (like everyone else who hears this sorry tale), "Didn't you back it up somewhere?" To which the answer is, "No. No I didn't." I have no explanation or excuse. I backed up The Shifter's Trail, and Archangel religiously, but, for some reason, couldn't be bothered to do so with The Deep Tunnel. After all, nothing you ever put in a computer really goes away, right?
Well, I've learned my lesson. The "new" Deep Tunnel is backed up every which way imaginable. Just last week, I wrote my 40,000th word. Again.
Interestingly, I did not simply recreate what I wrote the first time around. Even though the plot is unchanged, the story is significantly different. For instance, a major character I originally wrote as a squirrelly introvert has now become a braggadocious show-off. And even though the plot requires her to do particular things in a particular order, she does them differently. The effect on my main characters has been to send them in directions that diverge markedly from the original draft.
I like to think this new version is better than its predecessor, but we'll never know, will we? Because, sometimes, what gets lost, stays lost. Even in a computer.
Yeah, right.
I only have myself to blame for what follows, but... several months ago, I started work on The Deep Tunnel, the follow-up to my first novel, The Shifter's Trail. I plotted it out, wrote an outline, and started work, mostly keeping to my self-imposed target of at least 600 words a day. Andromeda and her friends started on their latest adventure. Day by day, the word count added up. Slowly at first: 652, 1,312. Then to more impressive totals: 10,111, 22,498. The project was going well. I got past 40,000 words and had entered what I think of as the "downhill" part of a novel, the part where you don't have to agonize about what happens next, because what happens next is the inevitable consequence of what you've already written. Even though it was still 20,000 plus words away, the end was in sight.
And then I lost it. All of it.
To this day, I don't know what happened. I opened my computer to start work and it had disappeared. I searched everywhere. No luck. I sent my drive to a vendor who specialized in retrieving lost, deleted, or corrupted files. No luck. The whole thing was gone.
Now, you might be asking (like everyone else who hears this sorry tale), "Didn't you back it up somewhere?" To which the answer is, "No. No I didn't." I have no explanation or excuse. I backed up The Shifter's Trail, and Archangel religiously, but, for some reason, couldn't be bothered to do so with The Deep Tunnel. After all, nothing you ever put in a computer really goes away, right?
Well, I've learned my lesson. The "new" Deep Tunnel is backed up every which way imaginable. Just last week, I wrote my 40,000th word. Again.
Interestingly, I did not simply recreate what I wrote the first time around. Even though the plot is unchanged, the story is significantly different. For instance, a major character I originally wrote as a squirrelly introvert has now become a braggadocious show-off. And even though the plot requires her to do particular things in a particular order, she does them differently. The effect on my main characters has been to send them in directions that diverge markedly from the original draft.
I like to think this new version is better than its predecessor, but we'll never know, will we? Because, sometimes, what gets lost, stays lost. Even in a computer.
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