The Return of Space

I’m so excited. I’ve finally received a report from the data recovery center and it looks, at this point, like I’ll be able to recover The Space between Atoms. If so, I’ll be able to resume where we left off starting next week.

Recovering data is very expensive. You see, I had thousands and thousands of files on my backup drive that failed. It cost more than I’d like to think (let’s just say a new computer would be cheaper) to recover it. There’s no way I could reconstruct literally over a decade of daily writing.

The company I used was kind enough to suggest some better storage solutions. Hell, these machines look serious. They also cost a lot of money. I guess most of us would really not like to think how fragile are data are.

Speaking of data, one of the English language watchdog groups—I forget which one—has now declared that singular verbs can be used with “data.” Data is the plural of datum, but we tend to use the word as a bloc of information, making its meaning essentially singular.

Pardon me for being so giddy. I’ve been about three months now without all my files. Because there was so much data on that disc (which I will be double backing up from now on) I’m not even sure what was actually lost. I was cheered to hear the technician say 99 percent had been recovered.

One thing cheered me. The technician didn’t tell me that I should put everything on the cloud. It seems that everyone (even work) trusts the cloud. In my experience clouds evaporate. I’d rather have my data right here where I can see them. Even if it means spending a little more money.

I’m not sure The Space between Atoms has been preserved, but the chances are good. I haven’t received the data yet, but it’s on the way. Very expensive lesson learned.

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Dusty

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Creativity

Maybe you’ve noticed this too. When you step away from fiction writing for a while, your creativity becomes flaccid. I’ve had to step away from this blog for a while because I was writing my sixth nonfiction book. God, I’ve missed fiction! Now that I’ve entered that phase of waiting for publishers to respond, I’ve turned my limited writing time back to fiction. I submitted a couple of stories this week and am waiting to hear about those as well. When you’re a writer, waiting is a way of life. Opening my software where I store my fiction stories, I was amazed by how many I found. Some of them are bad—so bad that they’ll never (rightfully) be published. Some are surprisingly good and have been sitting around while I finished up my nonfic. The vast majority, however, are unfinished. Some years back I realized that when I’m writing in the heat of inspiration but don’t have time to finish a story that I need to write down where I...

K. Marvin Bruce

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