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All those new story ideas I wrote while in Trenton on a laptop -gone! Lost, hopefully I can scour my mind for a trail or two and write them again...damn!
Posts: 287 | Registered: Jul 2006
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One time in college I was doing some research at the library and the computer told me to "Hit any key to continue." I spent a couple of minutes hitting keys and nothing happened. My boyfriend at the time, thinking he was being funny, said, "You have to hit the 'any' key." I glared at him and kept pushing buttons. Finally, after the third time he told me I needed to hit the "any" key, I said, "Fine!" I hit the 'a' then the "n' then the 'y'...and voila! the computer moved on to the next screen.
He just about fell on the floor laughing, "I told you you had to hit the 'any' key!"
Just so you know, these things aren't actually myths.
Sorry you had some bum luck with your computer. I always figure that the ideas worth keeping will still be there in your head and maybe when you type them out again, they'll be even better!
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You can pay to have someone recover them. I've done it (lost the darned document and paid a forensic person to recover from the copies still on the computer but not retreivable by me).
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The problem is, you tried to create something good and beautiful (your ideas) in the vortex of evil (New Jersey). New Jersey is a force of evil too strong to be overcome by a single bright mind.
"Umm, there is no 'enter' button. Oh! Did you mean on the keyboard?" (I work in technical support...I didn't make that up.)
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My sympathies! Back in the olden days of "floppy disks" (pre-mini-floppies, CDs, memory sticks, etc.) I had written a novel that was 186 single-spaced pages. I had five readers giving me input on it and had worked through about four of their edits, saving everything to the hard drive. I was working very quickly, so backup didn't occur to me (at the time. . .). Then a thunderstorm came and crashed my computer. I had to go back and re-enter four whole-novel edits in that novel. Argh. . . . Now I save every chapter to both the hard drive and a memory stick many times per writing session!!!
Lessons learned the hard way stick with us best, I'm afraid. Sorry about your loss, but I'll bet that, like me, you'll never forget to back up frequently again!
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I've always thought that coffee cup holder story was apocryphal. And then I started working in tech support, and I discovered people really ARE that dumb.
"Type the web address in the address bar." "Where is the address bar?" "Do you see the bar that says 'address' next to it?" "Yes." "That's the address bar." (Another real conversation from my job.)
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A friend who worked in Direct TV support fielded a call from a guy who said the sound was broken and the screen said "mutty" on it. When he realized he meant "mute" he about died trying not to laugh.
Posts: 366 | Registered: Sep 2006
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Lennon and McCartney had a strict songwriting policy: if they couldn't remember what they'd written, it couldn't've been any good, and it was better to forget it and work on something else.
I find writing down (and writing out) the idea and early development kind of nice, but, usually, when I write the actual story, I tend not to look at my notes.
[edited to insert a space between words]
[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited November 01, 2006).]
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Thanks for all the comments, you guys are the best! Robert you are absolutely right, its the same thing I tell my son when he can't remember what he wanted to ask - "must not have been that important then"
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Kudos to Robert for finding a way to say that without sounding like a jerk. Comeing from me it would almost have certainly seemed more like "LOL U R suxxrs ROFL", which is honestly not something I wanted to say.
Anyway, you can take a page from everyone's book and turn this into a hilariously exaggerated "Man vs Computer" story. Heck, you might even manage to remember some of the story concepts you lost if you go over events in a creative mindset.
I remember posting my brother's "Boy vs Laundromat" story around here somewhere. Does anyone remember that? It's pretty funny. I also remember posting his "Minority Youth vs Grumpy Old White Man" story...good times
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Well, I, too, used to write things down---at first, in a series of notebooks, then on assorted disks when I went computery. My idea-to-completed-story ratio was like, oh, one hundred to one in the notebook era...and more like ten to one in the computer era.
There's nothing wrong with writing your ideas down. I still write things down and try to work out how things would go---it helps me decide whether to go with it or not. Right now it's probably a five-to-one ratio---the ideas don't seem to come as fast as they used to.
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