The Space between Spaces

An external disk crash is a tragedy. You see, my computer doesn't have much memory. The little it has is claimed by the increasing size of the operating system at each update. I back my files up on a WD terabyte drive.

The drive failed this week. Although I hope to get the contents recovered, the remaining chapters of The Space between Atoms reside on that drive. In fact, the thousands of pieces of my writing yet unpublished do.

I don't trust the cloud. How can you trust something where your files, like a Heisenbergian electron can't be precisely traced? I like to know where my files are. Right now they're nowhere. The silly drive whirs and ticks like an electronic idiot, but it doesn't show where the files are.

Data recovery, I've discovered, costs eight times the cost of a disk drive. The lesson? Buying half a dozen backup drives is cheaper. If one disk fails your files are still somewhere.

Months of my life went into writing The Space between Atoms. Experts with dollar signs for irises tell me that the data are recoverable. Ah yes, for a price. Because of the pandemic you have to mail it in. I won't know where my files are. Ironic, isn't it?

You might suggest tracking. This past holiday season I had a package "delivered" according to the Post Office. Only it never was. I called my local branch. "Joe's usually pretty good about that sort of thing," they said.

Ideas are perhaps inherently unstable. I awake very early in the morning to write before work. I've been doing so for years. I've accumulated stories—many ready for publication—now gone. My laptop can run the latest system, but it has no room for all my work.

Does all of this make me trust the cloud? Not at all. There are spaces between atoms, and hopefully I'll be able to continue posting them soon. If they can recover my data. If not, we'll all have to live with the space between spaces. Tech is, after all, our friend.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa kept his manuscripts in a trunk and became posthumously famous. Will the same ever happen for those who keep their thoughts in the cloud?

Comments

Pacing

A criticism that I’ve occasionally received concerns pacing. The short story, which today means up to about 7000 words, is a limited amount of space to establish mood. My writing partner Elizabeth was reading a Poe short story recently and commented on how long it seemed. We’ve been accustomed, by the internet, to shorten things. Flash fiction is in. Say it in 1000 words or less. What’s the correct pacing for a 300-word story? I’ve been editing a number of my complete, but unpublished, stories lately. I’m trying to bring the word counts down. I don’t want to be thought of as a plodding writer. At the same time, I’m no action writer. My stories are thoughtful. Some time ago I started reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire . Dark, moody, and sensuous, this is a slow-paced novel. Focusing on subtleties and emotions, she paints a writerly picture of the inner life of the undead. If I were an editor to...

Small Town

I was born in a small town. That’s not a quote from John Cougar Mellencamp; it’s the truth. My hometown, which shall remain nameless here since it is sometimes easy to identify a person by such a small place, is who I am. We are defined by where we’re from. After spending my first decade, which I didn’t realize was a decade at the time, in my hometown we moved. We moved to an even smaller town. A community of less than a thousand. Industrial, dirty, and drug-ridden. I began to write. Like most restless minds in small towns, I wanted to escape. When I first saw the city, I was enamored. So many people. So much excitement. So little community. This week I received the happy news that my story “Prom Night Redux” was accepted for publication by Exterminating Angel Press: the Magazine . (More details to follow.) The story is close to my heart. It is a story about being from a small town and wanting...

Novel Thoughts

I’ve been quiet for a while because I was working on a novel. I’ve written novels before; seven of them. Thing is, they’ve never been published. One was under contract and then cancelled. Now it’s under consideration again. The other six are very patient. In addition to these novels, I’ve also written a nonfiction manuscript using my pen name. It’s not published either. The reason for this cross-over is that my current employment might become my past job if anyone read this piece. Best to keep my identity false. Long-form writing is something I enjoy doing. I do want some of the novels to be published, but it seems that you have to have someone take a chance on one before anyone will bother to look at another. Such is the writing life. Just a thought, but for my fiction you need to give it a little time. The first page might not snatch you, but the stories draw you in. I read novels like that. ...

K. Marvin Bruce

Search This Blog