Storage Wars

No, not the show where people fight to buy the contents of abandoned storage lockers, I’m talking storing your electronic files.

It goes without saying that you should back your work up and back it up often. There’s nothing worse than that feeling you get when you step away from the keyboard for just a second only to come back to find that your toddler erased everything you’ve laboured over for the last several weeks, or the cat jumped up on the desk and knocked your cold coffee onto the keyboard. So you already know to back your work up.

What I’m interested in is what you back your work up to.

In the beginning, I used WordPerfect, which automatically backed my work up as I typed. Then I graduated to Microsoft Word, which has the same feature. Once a week or so I’d back all my files up to a floppy disk or two (or three – they didn’t hold a whole lot). When I got a computer with a CD burner in it (I told you it was in the beginning – we’re talking dawn of time here) every couple of months I’d burn everything to a CD.

Fast forward a decade or two to when flash drives (aka thumb drives) became available. My first flash drive cost $80 and held 2 gigabytes of data – which was a big deal at the time. I could back my whole computer onto it! Not that I did, just all of my files. And I mean ALL my files, photos included.

Walmart currently has 32G USB flash drives with their back-to-school stuff for under $10. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! LOL

I have at least a dozen flash drives now, some empty, some with stuff on it. And I have an 64G SD card with a neat little gizmo that turns it into a flash drive that I can back everything onto. I can’t help thinking there’s got to be a better way of doing this.

Seriously, I’m only working on a few files at once, so most of what’s on these flash drives is storage. I’d like to find somewhere permanent to store some of these unused/finished files, but where? I don’t trust the cloud, and I live in fear of something happening to the flash drives, so I keep copies of everything on flash drives and my computer. I have an external hard drive, but it’s still in the box because my daughter had a bad experience with one and lost everything.

I’ve heard of other writers who don’t trust their computers and keep all of their work on flash drives. When they want to write, they stick the appropriate flash drive into the USB port and away they go. I don’t know that I could be comfortable doing that.

So what’s the answer? I think this will require some careful research.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

Editing – 4 hours
On a little story that has no name yet.

Blood Ties – 1,657 words
I’m getting steadily better.

Blog Posts – includes the post for my regular blog, but not the prompt story.
401 (regular blog)+ 923 + 357 = 1,681 words total

Weekly Prompt – 524 words

Total Words – 3,862

New Prompt
I'm not sure where this came from, it came from my prompts document. And it should go without saying that it's subject to change:
One morning in a restaurant, an old widow and a priest summon a zombie using only a clay tablet.

Goals From Last Week:
I got all my blog posts done, including a short one for my regular blog. The trick is to try and get them done early – so much less stressful!

Blood Ties is progressing nicely, but I really have to work out a Howard scene next and so far my mind is coming up blank as to what’s happening with him. Maybe Anakaron has him under a spell . . .

I was late again with the prompt story, but that was bad timing on my part. I kept putting it off and putting it off, and next thing I know it’s Thursday afternoon and I decided to write a Ghazal for my poetry group meeting that evening. Came home from the meeting and realized I didn’t like the prompt so I picked a new one and only got a bit of a start on it that night. Finished it up Friday and posted it when I was done.

The nameless story I’m editing is only a couple of pages long, and I’m more rewriting it than editing it I think. It was a former prompt story, and I as I was writing it I thought of changes I’d make if I had the time and I was smart enough to write them down.

Goals For This Week:
1. Get that pesky Howard scene done. Actually, I think I need two of them, but one for sure and then I can start making plans for his rescue.
2. New prompt story – and hopefully I’ll get to it earlier this week so not only will I leave myself enough time to get it done on time, but also to find a new prompt if I need to.
3. I actually almost finished that little nameless story, so I want that done so I can find another one.

And there’s what I’ll be up to this week. How about you?

Backing It Up

You know, it breaks my heart every time I read/hear about someone who’s lost that precious story or even the next best-selling novel because their computer crashed or got stolen, or there was a fire or flood, or the apocalypse happened. And in this day and age it’s so unnecessary!

You never know when disaster will strike. So I tell you all now, BACK YOUR WORK UP!

But wait! Get back here. Don’t go backing up yet, I have more to say.

Be organized when you back your work up.

*cue puzzled murmuring*

Let me tell you a story.

*waits for heartfelt groans to die down*

I’ll try and keep it short.

Really.

Okay, maybe not really. But you need to hear this. So quit belly-aching and just read.

As you know, I’ve been procrastinating spending a lot of time lately cleaning up and generally trying to get my writing files organized. Many writing files. Many, many writing files. While I’ve always been pretty good at backing my documents up, I’ve been pretty bad about doing it in an organized fashion. What I typically did was create a folder on a USB key and then just copy everything (and by everything I mean all my documents, whether I’d changed anything or not and any miscellaneous files, photos, etc.) from my laptop into the new folder on the key and call it done.

These folders had names like: short term 1, short term 2, miscellaneous 1, miscellaneous 2, current stuff 1, current stuff 2 . . . I think you get the idea. This is called laziness (in case you were wondering). The problem with this method is that it leaves me with multiple copies of the same document and I don’t know which is the one I’ve been working on. Did I mention I have about a dozen USB keys and all of them have got stuff saved to them in this fashion? And it gets better.

Not being entirely trusting of the whole USB key thing, every once in awhile I’d back my files up to a DVD. All of my files. Together. Then I’d label the DVD with the current date and stick it in a box. A big box. And now I have an external hard drive sitting in a box just waiting for the day when I get my files all organized so I can save everything to it. You know, unless everything crashes first or I get hit with an EMP or some natural disaster occurs.

The moral of the story, kiddies, is: Save your work and back it up on a regular basis, but do so in an organized fashion!

Prompt of the Week

I’ve been having so much fun with the prompts from The Story Shack that I think I’m going to keep using them until I stop having fun. :-D

Go ahead and give it a try! And don’t forget to check back Saturday to see what I’ve come up with.

Word count: 600
Genre: Crime
Character: A programmer
Material: A pencil
Sentence: "It was her!"
Bonus: Your character is imprisoned.

Technical Difficulties

So... I did some babysitting last night, and since part of that time would be after the granddaughter’s bedtime, I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to get a jump start on this post.

So we played for a while and I put the baby to bed and I set my lap top up on the table and ... ran into some technical difficulties. Namely, with the wireless mouse. I could move it around, I could click on my document file and the cursor would go where I indicated, but I wasn’t able to type in it. I could play solitaire, but it wouldn’t connect to the internet.

I might point out at this juncture that I hate the track pads on lap tops, so the first thing I do is disable it, which is why I didn’t try that instead. Well, that and I only just thought of it now. And also, the way my lap top is set up, every time I start it up I have to make a new connection to the internet, and it takes forever, so normally I just leave my lap top on and let it hibernate when I’m not using it.

So, after changing the battery in the mouse didn’t help, I shut the laptop down completely, deciding to deal with it when I got home. Now obviously a simple re-booting fixed the problem, but it still begs the question of why it happened in the first place. Unfortunately, I’m not techy enough to figure it out.

In the meantime, I’ll be making sure I back everything up just in case it happens again. You do back up your own work, don’t you? Personally, I back up to several different USB keys and once in a while I’ll back everything up to a DVD.

You should always back up to two different sources, just to be on the safe side. The daughter had an external hard drive that she used for backing up and it failed, taking with it four years of documents and pictures. I’ve heard of this happening to others as well.

I’m not sure I absolutely trust the USB keys and DVDs for longevity, but given the daughter’s experience with the external hard drive, I’m not sure that’s the answer either. A lot of people back up via the internet - emailing themselves, using the Cloud or Dropbox, but then of course you have the worry of getting hacked.

I guess the only real solution is to write fast and get published. ;-)

Wordage Report

Blog Posts (not counting this one)
3,2142 words total
Down by about 400 words from last week. Apparently I was a little more succinct with my posts. I have to admit though, a couple of them were a bit of a struggle which resulted in a few late nights. I keep saying I’m going to work on them earlier, but I never seem to.

Goodreads Reviews
325 words total
I manage to finish three books in the last couple of weeks - I know there was another one but I didn’t write down and I have no clue what it was. The one I’m currently reading on my Kindle is insanely long, which doesn’t necessarily make for a longer blog post next week - it’s not a particularly good one.

New Ideas
0 words total
Okay, I think I’m going to get rid of this category next week. It’s not that I wouldn’t like some new ideas, it’s more that I just don’t have time for them right now.

Editing
0 pages total
I have to tell you, I didn’t even crack Elemental Earth open last week. Technically there’s no rush, but I’d really like to get it done.

New Words
3,743 words total
Not bad, it was an average of around 500 words a day. This was split more or less evenly between Wandering Wizards and a story I pulled out of mothballs - a slightly humorous romantic fantasy about a magician’s assistant and a real wizard.

This Week’s Goals:
New words on Wandering Wizards
New words on Mercy
Figure out how to start Elemental Spirit
Bonus blog post

Again, I only met half of my goals from last week. While I got a few more words in on Wandering Wizards and I decided to trunk Dreamer for now, I’m no closer to figuring out how to start Elemental Spirit and I still haven’t written that bonus post I was all excited about.

This week’s excerpt is from my new story, Mercy For the Wizard:

Mercedes Latimer stood in front of the full length mirror and took a good look at herself. A sigh escaped before she could prevent it as she took in the full effect of the costume.

The white corset was a shade too tight, barely containing her generous breasts. But the white made a nice contrast to the black bottoms which were cut high on her hips. Instead of the typical fishnet stockings she wore just regular pantyhose, most of which were covered up by thigh high, spike heeled, vinyl boots. Around her neck was a white bowtie and topping her long dark curls was a top hat, set at a jaunty angle.

Taking a couple of steps in the boots she frowned as she wobbled. "Guess I should have taken the time to practice walking in these things." Although she enjoyed wearing high heels, these made her feel like she was walking on tip toe.

She walked across the room and back to the mirror again. "I cannot go out onto the stage looking like this," she said to her reflection. Her reflection seemed to agree.

Mercy, as her friends called her, enjoyed working as a magician's assistant. She loved the excitement and the glamour and she was pretty darned good at it. Granted the Fabulous Fernando was a bit of a tool, but no job was perfect.

Checking her watch she swore under her breath. She'd intended to get to the club early to show Fernando the tricks she'd been working on - she was angling for a bigger role in the show - but if she didn't get a move on she was going to be late.

Giving her reflection one last scowl, she picked up the tuxedo jacket that completed the outfit, brushing a stray piece of lint off of the tails and shrugging it on.

Not only were the boots uncomfortable to walk in, the vinyl was incredibly hot. She was going to be a mess by the end of the night.

"What the hell?"

There was some kind of blue smoke in her living room. Before she went into full panic mode, she gave an experimental sniff. She couldn't smell anything, it was more like a blue fog than smoke, but where was it coming from?

Turning in a circle, she frowned. The fog seemed to be spinning with her. No, it was spinning faster and faster around her. Mercy felt buoyant, weightless. All she could see around her was the blue fog and it was getting denser.

Mercy opened her mouth to scream as the whole world shifted.