The Computer Ate My Homework

 Well, it’s official. My computer ate my homework. Which is to say, my computer died and took my files with it.

Three weeks ago I got stuck in the rain, and I happened to have my tablet with me. It was a horrendous downpour. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t get it to a shop until the end of the week, or if it died more or less instantly, but the end result was, because it was such a compact instrument, it was a complicated business just to answer whether or not my files were retrievable even before the diagnosis, and certainly out of the question after.

So I lost material. I lost the whole Oz affair. I lost Squire’s History of Oz, the greater nonfiction work, and “Falling Toward Oz,” which for me was far more valuable. I talked about this stuff here. It was actually some of the last material I actively talked about here. If COVID-10 hadn’t hit, this would not have even been an issue. I don’t have Wi-Fi at home. I travel to get it. This was far easier pre-pandemic, and even beyond that, when everything closed, it was more or less around the time I was completing this work. I’d’ve self-published it months ago. 

But now it’s been eaten. If I wanted, I could reconstruct the book itself and even tackle the story again. I’m not feeling especially motivated to do that at the moment. I’m not grieving. I kind of figured this was going to be the result, and so I made peace with it the day I turned the tablet into the shop.

I lost the manuscript I carved out of In the Land of Pangaea, something I didn’t really talk about here, something I did earlier in the summer and submitted to a contest. All the work on that is lost unless by some miracle it has legs in the contest. Again, I could be okay with that. I loved working on that thing. It was if nothing else an excellent exercise in revision. 

I lost this year’s Christmas poem package for my niece! I wrote it ridiculously early as it was, so I can always rewrite that well before the end of the year. I know the bones of what I wrote. I can either attempt to replicate or do something new. It’s okay.

I lost some plotting for Space Corps! I didn’t lose the major Space Corps material. I have the Seven Thunders manuscript, and notes in an actual notebook for most of what I had been working on, and copies attached to emails for other things. There’s so much already quite unwritten about Space Corps anyway, it’s difficult to say what can be lost in such a manner as this. Having Seven Thunders as it is, and in the revised form as I’ve worked on it, is the main thing, and what would’ve been the big loss in a previous computer loss.

That’s not everything, but those are the highlights. I have email copies of stories I wrote this year. I will have to revert to backups for additional poetry collections, whenever I get around to that project again, losing whatever work I had done in that regard. (I think it eats what would’ve been the next release, in the state I left it, which again would not have been a problem pre-shutdown, because I would have published it well before this happened).

Last week I bought a school-sized (rather than pocket-sized) notebook, with the intention to perhaps work on stories and/or notes there. This would not be a guarantee against loss, either, but it would offer a different level of control. I have some really old notes! Stuff dating back to probably 1996 at least, a lot of old Space Corps material. That’s how I always did it before. Then at some point I started doing it on a computer, and when I had a printer handy would carefully print it out (another backup model!). Technically I have a printer now but have no idea if it actually works. I inherited from my sister. Has been sitting on a desk I don’t work at (I find desks hard to work at for extended periods, unless they’re big, and this one isn’t).

And at some point I will buy a new computer of some extraction. And be very, very careful, especially as it comes to file preservation!