I’ve been away for a week or more.  Not by choice this time, at least not my choice, but by the choice of the computer gods.  I’m still not certain exactly what happened, only that the end result was my inability to access my hard drive because both my motherboard and my power supply had done a meltdown.

It’s been a nightmare trying to put everything back together again.

What’s worse … this isn’t the first time it’s happened.  This is the third or fourth time I’ve had a computer do a meltdown on me since 1984 when I first started using a computer for my writing and publishing.

Now, you might think that’s not so bad, four times in 22 years. Doesn’t sound that bad.  Give me three weeks and I’ll probably agree with you.  But for the moment, even once in 22 years seems like too much. Computers were supposed to make my life easier.  Wasn’t that their promise?

Now, to be brutally honest, I might never have gone into writing if it weren’t for computers. Even though I started out on a typewriter, it was a smart typewriter, with the ability to remember a page or two at a time and a little window where I could see the line I was typing.  Pretty cool back then.

Then in 1984 I got my first computer (actually, it was a loan from my father) and suddenly I could write much longer stories without worrying about having to retype them all over again during the editing stage.  Wonderful!

Of course, this was back in the days of the floppy disk and software programs like WordStar. Then each time I upgraded my program, I’d have to upgrade all my stories so they’d be compatible. And when 3.5 disks came along, I should have (but didn’t) converted all my stories to those disks. Then WordStar died and I went to another program that I don’t even recall now (doing my best to resist Microsoft products because they dominated the marketplace and I preferred the potential benefits of competition). Eventually, I ended up with Word anyway, and computer disks (or computer discs, because “disk” apparently refers to magnetic storage devices, while “disc” refers to optical storage devices).

Most of my stories and novels are now on disc, which is great until some new format comes out and I have to switch them all again. All of the old Horror Show issues are still on 5 1/4″ floppies.  My brother-in-law says he has a working drive that can copy them. Of course, I would then have to convert them all to Word files, which could take months. So I think I’ll leave them be for now.

I can’t tell you how many months I’ve invested in either upgrading or rebuilding my work so I could continue to have access to it through my computer.

Definitely a nightmare.

But not as intimidating as the idea of retyping a 400 page manuscript!

Dave

PS - I have no idea if this sort of information is of any interest to you or not. If you’d rather not see it here, please let me know.  If you’d like to see more of it, I really need to know that, too.

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