On Writing

Many years ago I had planned to be a novelist.

I had a little notebook filled with plot ideas for books, hundreds of them, ranging from Stephen King-esque horror stories to Gone With The Wind-like epics to science fiction sagas that would have made George Lucas regret he had every thought of Star Wars.

I was going to be the most famous author to ever live: Bigger than Mailer, bigger than Hemingway, bigger than Dickens or Twain.

So what stopped me?

I wrote. That’s what stopped me.

One evening, many years ago, I sat down at the computer (yes, I had one way back

then! I have had a computer since I was 12 in one form or another) and I started to write. And I kept at all through that evening, all through that night, as the sun came up the next morning, through the afternoon and finally stopped writing about 25 hours after I started.

I had written about 150 pages and, completely exhausted, I went to bed.

When I finally woke up, I read what I had written. Every storyline and character I had been planning to use was in it. My whole story ended up being told in a mere 150 pages.

And it was CRAP!

I printed out a copy and sent it to a friend of mine to read. I wanted to see if someone else thought it was as much crap as I thought it was. His response?

“Look out Jackie Collins! There’s a new kid in town!”

Jackie Collins?

I knew it was bad, but it was THAT BAD!

I gave up writing after that review, and didn’t pick it up again until I got this website registered 6 or 7 years ago. I wrote a couple small stories for the website and posted them (back when I was coding the site with html, all by hand, with very little knowledge of what I was doing).

Well, then came the big move to Boston. I had put all of my writing files onto a compact disc and erased the files from my computer, because my computer at the time was very short of storage space and I needed every little bit I could free up.

The disc, however, was destroyed in the move. Now, at this point you are probably thinking “No problem there, mate! They’re on your website!”

Normally this would have been true.

But one of the first things I did once I was in Boston and had set up my computer was to replace the whole website with my resume because I didn’t want prospective employers reading my website until I was hired. To make sure they couldn’t get to anything I didn’t want them seeing, I erased everything off the website.

It was after I did this (still thinking I had my disc when I did it) I found the box with the disc in it and saw that the disc had come out of the jewel case and bounced around the box during the move. It was so scratched up (and even chipped) that my computer would no longer read it.

So, why have I taken you down memory lane and wasted your time by explaining the stupid mistakes I have made in the past?

Because I didn’t learn the first 500 times that I screwed up an lost an electronic version of something I had written because I wasn’t careful.

Earlier this year I was having problems with my website because Google shut me down (even though my site is not hosted on their servers, they still managed to shut me down) and to fix it I had to start over with my website.

To start over, I had to delete every single file on my site. This included all the items I had written and placed into the writing sub domain. Once I had done this, Google released their stranglehold on my site and I could start to build it up again.

But I didn’t have any saved copies of my posts, or my writing.

So, this whole diatribe is just one big warning, for you and even more for me now that I am going to be going to school, to back up all your files as much as possible!

This way, somewhere you will have saved copies of your work!