Kicking Myself

It was more than a year ago, but I'm still kicking myself over losing a USB Flash drive that contained the most current stories and writing projects I had on file.

I forgot a cardinal rule of working with computer files: BACK IT UP. Some of the stuff had earlier versions of stories on file on a hard drive between my desktop computer and my laptop, but I had foolishly kept the major stuff - especially a gathering of short stories I was planning to put into a new anthology - onto that one USB stick... and then I couldn't find it.

If I'm lucky, it just fell behind some furniture that's too heavy to lift up at the moment. I'm not desperate enough to re-arrange the entire townhouse to find it. However, it's frustrating me enough to curse my very existence.

If I had to, I could recover some of the works and edit them back up to where I'm sure I had my finished drafts, but I am definitely missing several key stories I would love to include in that planned anthology to make it all tie together in a nice theme.

/headdesk

REMEMBER MY SINS, WRITERS. BACK UP EVERYTHING YOU GOT.

 

A Writer's Lament

There is nothing more heartbreaking to a writer than the loss of the USB flash drive that contained every Work-In-Progress and archived story you've ever written.

/anguished scream

With luck, the flash drive is merely dropped behind or underneath some furniture in my house. Bad luck would be if it had fallen into a trash can and already placed in the condo unit's dumpsters.

/anguished scream repeated

The good news is I've done backups, and I have older flash drives that contain earlier versions of stuff I'd written and were working on before the newest flash drive. Unfortunately, everything after 2018-19 was on that flash drive, and if I try to go back and restart stuff... well, if I gotta I gotta.

There was also a lot of personal stuff - photos, family docs, research - on that USB that I'm missing as well.

ALWAYS HOLD ON TO YOUR FLASH DRIVES, PEOPLE.

 

Elmore Leonard Writes His Last Death Scene

He tipped his hat, looked upward with a tear in his eye.  "I do believe that men meet their moment with dignity and grace."  He didn't say much after that. - Not Elmore Leonard

One of the greats of modern American literature passed away this morning.  Elmore Leonard, who started off with Westerns moving up to modern-day Crime Thrillers, had been ill for awhile it all finally caught up with him.

Hate to say it was the movies that got my attention.  His works seem to translate well into film and it was the series of caper flicks post-Tarantino (Hollywood loves to beat a genre to death) - Get Shorty, Jackie Brown (off of Rum Punch), and Out of Sight - that led me to finding his print works on the shelves and diving in.

I've got a personal love for Out of Sight, both movie and book, and if anyone says anything bad about either I will hunt you down.

In terms of writing, Leonard is one of the go-to mentors who provided a decent list of rules.

1.  Never open a book with weather (note: his take that to anyone going with "It was a dark and stormy night").
2.  Avoid prologues.
3.  Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4.  Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5.  Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. 
6.  Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7.  Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8.  Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9.  Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10.  Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Why I Failed NaNoWriMo This Year

Well...

1) Personal issues such as the loss of my poor Silly Kitty Page, whose cancer got bad enough to take her to the vet for one last visit...

2) Problems with my story's narrative, even with trying to correct some of the character introductions and opening action scenes.  Things felt heavy-handed or operating on poor assumptions.

3) Chronic Depressive Mood and growing stress from job-hunting as I close in on my third year of full unemployment... :(

All apologies.  I am thinking of getting some short stories or novella-type work done in the coming days.

The Mix Of News, Good And Bad And Sad

There's a few things to note:

In the Good News category, Centennial Park Library in the Pasco Libraries system is going to stay open!  After the threat of closure by the county commission, the library got 3,000 plus signatures of support from the local community and was able to convince the commission to keep it open.  The Bad News: the state and the county are still tight against the budget, meaning cuts will have to come from somewhere else - jobs.  The commission will see about eliminating any current vacancies first, but if they have to they may cut existing jobs, which is still a bad thing to happen (as an unemployed person, I will be saddened by anyone else losing their jobs).

In the Sad News category: someone I knew from Tarpons Springs High School Class of 1988 passed away.  Mike McGee was someone I knew since middle school, actually, and he was who I considered a regular guy: smart enough to be in the good classes, popular enough to be in the good cliques, but thankfully not a total jerkass about it.  Played football, linebacker if I recall (EDIT: My brother Phil corrected me, said it was Offensive Guard).  Went to Florida State, got a law degree, went into Patent Law at a firm in Chicago.  Only saw him at the high school reunions, but I had emailed him once or twice about patent ideas I was bouncing about me brain (informal chats, really.  Any formal chat would have cost me!).  He got married, had  kids.
And then he got cancer and died yesterday from it.
I don't like death.  It ends so many chances, so many things to do, so many people to meet, so many regrets you're left with.  I'd like to think McGee didn't regret much: he lived in all respects - a family, children, a good job, God knows what adventures he'd had along the way.  The regrets are all ours now.