NOLA STARs

Following Dennis's lead with Old and New as blog subjects....

Old being a relative term, what I'm doing under that heading is picking up a story I started last summer then set aside after 70+ pages.  This is the New Orleans story that had to be abandoned after my publisher requested a change of setting from the U.S. to England for my new trilogy, a request which resulted in a totally different set of story lines.  Now that the rough draft of the first UK-set novel is done, the plan is to finish this New Orleans tale since I really liked its premise.  As this book is not under contract at present, I can proceed at my own pace, go any direction I like with it.

What's new is a sudden and fervent dedication to backing up my computer.  Why?  My desktop PC crashed a couple of weeks ago.  Oh, yeah, the hard drive.   I'm not sure whether an Internet worm ate it, a virus took it out, or I just added the proverbial last straw of programs to the couple of dozen it had already, but everything that was on it vanished.  Did I have a complete backup?  Ha!  I mean, I've been using computers for almost 25 years and never, ever crashed anything.  Windows never even crashed on any of the 10 or so computers and laptops I've owned over the years.  I suppose I thought I was immune to this disaster. 

Well, okay, I did have backups on CDs for the complete files (notes, research, character and chapter charts as well as manuscript texts) for my last 10 books.  My new English medieval book had been written on my laptop, so it and its extra files were okay.  A lot of the other data--photos, family tree information, music--could be gathered up again from other sources.  But decades of workshops, speeches, letters and addresses and a thousand other things--all gone.  What hurt the most was that those 70+ pages of the New Orleans book were missing.  For almost two weeks, I thought they were lost in cyberspace.  Then--then!--I realized that I had transferred them to my laptop back in October when I took it on a trip.  Hosanna!  The lost were found.   So I'm back in business.  I have a new hard drive that's so clean it runs at the speed of light, and I'm laboriously gathering back up all the bits and pieces of my writing life.  I'm also venturing back out onto the 'Net again, as with this blog.  And I'm serving as an example of what not to do.  Be warned then.  Keep your virus protection up to date because it's a sick world out there.  Back up your hard drive.  Oh, and if you know of a fast and easy way to do the last, let me know....

Warmest, Jennifer