For those of you who have followed me for the past tens years, you know that I wrote a novel manuscript, was trying to edit the first one without losing inertia on writing a sequel. Unfortunately the cost of this was neglecting this blog. Then in November last year the unthinkable happened. My computer was accessed by a group of <insert your favorite explicative here> ‘s. They succeeded in corrupting every MS document on the system. While trying to recover the computer, the Geek Squad technicians succeeded in losing 437 files. This included my manuscript and all edits made in the past year. Now some of you will say, “Well just recover the files from your OneDrive account. There backed up automatically.”
“Not so fast,” says I. I thought that as well. However, a month of making this attempt and working with MS proved to be a complete waste of time. The official response is they have no idea what happened to my files. To those of you who are relying on OneDrive, my advice is to bite the bullet and purchase an external hard drive and perform your own backups every day or at least once per week. I’m talking about your working files, not your system apps.
The good news is that after 3 months of head down computer work and some luck with flash drives. I was able to recreate my manuscript including all edits. Needless to say I now have it backed up in five different secure and separate locations. Live and learn.
The next point is that I am looking for a few beta readers. Though not required, an interest in fantasy and/or western genre’s would be beneficial. If you are interested, please contact me through the link on this site for more details.
Now my question to all of you published writers of fiction. What are your thoughts on writing shorts based in your world with your primary characters to use as “bait” or to submit to competitions in an effort to crate interest in the larger work? What potholes may appear when heading down this road?
I’m looking forward to seeing your thoughts.
Tales From The Hare 
Mick Canning
March 31, 2024 at 1:09 pm
One immediate thought on the shorts, is that in doing so the characters might develop in ways counter to the main novel. Not necessarily, but it could cause problems down the line.
Dennis Langley
April 1, 2024 at 10:18 am
Thanks Mick. I understand what you are saying. That is my main concern as well. Trying to keep the characters in line is sometimes a major challenge. If I can keep the stories short enough, maybe i can keep them from straying too far off the path. 😉
Mick Canning
April 1, 2024 at 12:53 pm
I find it essential to have a stern word with them every now and again.
Matthew Wright
March 31, 2024 at 4:19 pm
Glad you were able to recover the manuscript – it’s not good when that happens. A friend of mine, about to complete a major work of non-fiction, had a hard drive fail with no backup copy and had to spend ridiculous sums on data recovery. It worked, luckily – and the book subsequently won an award. The other ‘loss problem’ I’ve run into is file format. Some of my very earliest computer-typed work, dating back to the early 1990s, isn’t readable by modern systems. I’ve kept the files and can force Word to render the text by switching off some of its security settings, but all formatting – including line and paragraph breaks – vanishes. It’s doubtless possible to write a macro to fix this, but my inner geek doesn’t stretch so far.
Writing ‘shorts’ to expand your reader footprint sounds excellent. Maybe a bit of planning to build an overall character arc and event sequence into which the stories fit would be useful? Even if that’s then thrown out or revised later.
Dennis Langley
April 1, 2024 at 10:15 am
Thank you, Matt. I still have some early works that were written in Word Perfect. At some point I should convert them. But not anytime soon.
The idea of the shorts would be to help explain some backstory and motivations not included in the main story line. Even if they are never seen by the public, it would be a good exercise, I think.