So Tuesday and Wednesday nights I spent revising both The Transcendental Man and Deadliest Cachalot. I actually fell asleep both nights at the computer, but was making good progress. I felt T-Man was ready to be subbed and Deadliest was getting there.
Then my computer decided to lock up and crash.
I can't get the fucker to boot up and now I have no idea if I will be able to save any of my files. It all could very well be gone. Forever. The last time I made a backup was so long back, it ain't even worth considering for much of my work. Now, the music, videos, graphics and other assorted stuff - I'll be disappointed if they are lost, but will deal. It's the 15 years worth of stories, notes, columns, articles and other things I've written that I am worried about. If those are gone, I may very well have to commit seppuku (I have a decent sword collection after all) or something.
The ironic part? This coming Saturday I was planning on purchasing an external drive for the sole purpose of backing up my stuff. Making things worse, I cannot even check my email! For some idiotic reason, I wrote down the passwords for all my email accounts except for the one I've used to submit stories. So I can check all the other accounts via The Other Half's computer (which I'm using now), but I have no idea if I'm receiving any rejections or acceptances. I have to wait until Saturday before the tech guy can look at things and determine how bad things are.
All in all, if I lose all my stuff, I'm gonna be pretty devastated. Sure, I can always re-write The Transcendental Man, Deadliest Cachalot, The Faceless Ones and others, all under the notion that they can only be improved upon, but I wouldn't really have much enthusiasm. The prospect of all my stuff vanishing into the great unknown, along with some records that I've kept for 20+ years, would be enough to make me consider giving up at writing again.
Here's hoping it can all be saved.
EDIT: Well, with help from The Other Half, I found the password for my email and what the hell do you know, there was an acceptance from Microhorror.com. They accepted my flash piece The Memory of Life and have already posted it. Read it HERE.
So the official 2009 tally is Rejections: 3, Acceptances: 2, Potential Catastrophes: 1
7 comments:
Usually when a computer locks up it is one of two things 1. hard drive crash, in which case there is a 50/50 chance that the information is gone or 2. a motherboard crash- this is actually fairly common in which case the hard drive is still in good shape and the information can be recovered.
I haven't been storing any stories on my computer, they are all on flash drive and disk. I like flash drives you can use any computer.
Good luck. I will be praying to the megabyte gods for you.
Fingers crossed, man. I've lost two hard drives worth of stories over the years to this kind of thing and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I'm sending the best positive vibes I can muster. A computer crash sucks big time.
Like Jamie, I keep everything on a flash drive. Pretty stable.
That sucks, dude. I've been trying to back up all my stories on an internet hard drive, but maybe I should probably just stick them on a flash drive, probably a lot more stable. Hope you get your work back! I lost a batch once, too, long ago. It's depressing.
And I like your story. Probably not what most people would think of as horror, but a scary prospect nonetheless.
*hyperventilates* That is my great fear, losing all my writing. But I'm obsessive about doing backups. Good luck!
And congrats on the acceptance--at least that was a little good news!
Thanks for the positive vibes, everyone. If at some point over the weekend, you hear a news story about a madman with a sword in Sacramento...you'll know things went badly. ;)
Just for good measure I just backed my flashdrive up on CD.
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