#Writerrecharge, final post

#writerrecharge#writerrecharge

Well, the month of February has come and gone, and I am truly thankful for the effort of #writerrecharge and all of its participants. You guys rock, and you have kept me motivated all month long. I hope you all accomplished everything you had set out to do. Prepare for a LONG post to come below. It is my explanation for my week.

I said that I wanted to accomplish 1250 words this past week and to work on my book blurb. Well, it’s funny. Things happen and plans change. Let me explain.

My husband is such a great man. He got a bug to try and get into two old computers. One was a Win98 laptop that I have not had the password to in probably seven or more years. The other was a Dell laptop–that had a broken off power supply. I think I lost using it back in 2010. I had taken it to technicians to try to get it fixed and was told it was unfixable.

You have to realize that I was devastated about losing that computer. ALL of my most current work was on that machine as well as all my contracts and so on from published books since 2008. I hadn’t backed up, of course (what writer does? we write too much too often!)–but I was resigned. I told myself, it was okay. I could write more. I could write better. I wouldn’t EVER need those stupid stories anyway.

In other words, I lied to myself and made me believe it.

So when my hubby set out to do these great and terrible things, I could only cringe and nod and say okay, but you’ve been warned. If he succeeded, great – I would be happy. If not, well, nothing lost. I was without the data before he began this journey.

Well, the 98 machine was the easiest to tackle so he tried it first. I stood over his shoulder in our kitchen and watched as the old laptop came to life (insert music here by Evanescence http://youtu.be/3YxaaGgTQYM )

When the password screen appeared, he looked at me. “This is all you, babe.”
I stared. Something clicked. Could it be that the password had finally come to my mind again after all these years? I said, “Try master.”

He typed the word master, and the computer came up. I saw the folder on the desktop that said, “Kim’s writing stuff” and burst into tears. Things on that laptop had been kept from me since 2003. Only God alone could make me remember that password. My loving spouse held me while I really, truly wailed. I didn’t expect to react so strongly. I was so happy. I told him even if he never got into the other laptop, I would be thrilled to have this work alone.

I spent all of Monday night copying over the data from that old machine to the Internet and emailing all my lost work to myself. It took a long time because the computer was not Internet worthy. But I did it! But I also didn’t get any writing done.

On Tuesday afternoon while I was at my job, my hubby sent me a text. It was a picture of my desktop (in safe mode) on the Dell laptop. Again, he had somehow against all odds, managed to get into a computer that was believed to be unusable. I controlled my emotions. The screen was in safe mode. Something was not going to work. It was going to be a bomb. I couldn’t get excited. Not emotional at all. I was at work, for heaven’s sake.

I raced home. I must have broken all speed laws to get there. When I walked in he explained that the patient was only holding on by a mere thread. “Do NOT move it or touch it,” he told me. He’d managed to hook up an external mouse and keyboard for me to use. I sat in front of it and found all of my work there — utterly unaffected. Stories, articles, books, EVERYTHING I’ve ever needed for years.

I bawled. I screamed. I danced. And then I began the painstaking job of sending it all to myself via email once again. It was easier to do, this was a newer machine with Windows Vista on it. But there was SO MUCH of it that it still took a long time. So, no writing for me Tuesday night either.

Wednesday night, I wrote 887 words on my contemporary romance because I felt in a love mood. Then Thursday night I spent time with a writing buddy and had dinner. No writing. Then Friday night, I snuggled with my hubby who is super great *(did I tell you that?)* and watched the news and when he went to bed, (he works nights) fell asleep on the couch. No writing for me.

So this morning, I said, I am going to write on the apocalypse story, and I did. I sat down and when I got finished there were 664 shiny news words done. So I managed to do my word count but not before March 1st. I think you will agree that it was worth it. I surely do! Besides, I probably made up for the last four hundred or so words with blog posts. I try to do that each day.

So anyway, here is an excerpt from one of the works that has been restored to me. Thanks again everyone who has been a part of this #writerrecharge month. I really want to do more of this soon. This excerpt is from a historical romance I penned sometime between 2003 and 2010. Only about 4 pages is written, but I remember the plot.

someone is waiting for you ...
David Kracht / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

Alannah Burke, chapter one.

“Well, I wouldn’t marry him for all the money in the world!”

The parlor at Five Elms teemed with eligible girls sitting demurely holding

delicate teacups. The hostess for the gathering, Alannah Burke, sat in their midst

declaring her stand on marriage. Her emerald eyes danced with mischief as she listened

to the murmuring her words brought on.

“Who would you marry then? There’s not enough good men in this town, that’s

the problem,” declared Lara Conrad, twirling her golden ringlet around her finger.

“Not enough good, or good-looking,” agreed Mary Stewart, a tall freckled girl

whose looks Alannah thought could stand improvement also. Alannah took two sugar

cubes from the tray and dropped them into her cup. She would not bow down to the

popular opinion that men should be beautiful before wise.

“I intend to marry for love, and only love. Looks are passing,” she said. “A man

should be intelligent, and dutiful.”

“You sound like a minister. The last time I checked, love wasn’t required,” said

Nancy Duncan, who had remained quiet, sipping her tea and watching the others over her

cup.

“Oh, but it is! How can a woman marry for anything else?”

Nancy shrugged, refusing to comment. Alannah shifted her gaze around the room

waiting for someone to support her ideas. No one did. Every one of the girls seemed

intimidated by the dark and lovely older Nancy.

About master

Kim Smith is the author of the Shannon Wallace Mysteries, and the Mt. Moriah Series- plus, YA fantasy, and Bizarro fiction. All available on Amazon.

Page with Comments

  1. What an incredible story! And with such a happy ending! I had a similar experience back in December, but not to that magnitude – WOW. I can’t imagine losing that much work, but I’m so glad you were able to recover it. BIG happy dance for you!

  2. How exciting for you, Kim! All those stories you had written off as lost forever restored to you–wonderful! I think it’s quite understandable that you didn’t get to your writing goal until later in the week. It seems like #WriterRecharge was a win for you in more ways than one! 🙂

  3. sounds like you had quite a week! I’m glad all is well, though, and that you were able to save your work. I’m computer illiterate and would be so screwed if something happened to my computer!

  4. What a story! I’m glad your husband could recover old data for you. That’s wonderful. I have an old desktop (sitting next to me) with photo files I’d really like to convert over to my external hard drive.

    And, now that you have a data recovery triumph, it’s time to get real about backing up. LIke you, I never used to back up my work. Now that I’m contracted with an agent, and (crosses fingers) hopefully with a publisher soon, it’s required of me to treat my work like a professional. There are cloud storage options for free, like Dropbox. My manuscript autosaves to Dropbox so I don’t have to do a single thing to back it up. I then make regular copies saved to my hard drive and an external drive. But my computer and external drive are damaged, my work is still stored externally in the cloud. I highly encourage you to do this! OK, now I swear I’m kicking the soapbox down the stairs. Congrats on all your writing progress!

  5. Hi! Congratulations – I hereby declare that you didn’t just win Writer Recharge, you won Writer Resuscitate! That is a fantastic story about your two old computers. I’m sorry to say we have two of those around here as well – a giant 98 Compaq tower and a 2002 Dell. There are a lot of things that I need to get off of those two PCs. Kinda reminds me of Y2K when I spent New Year’s Eve backing everything up onto floppy disks. 🙂

    Thanks for joining us for Writer Recharge – it was a lot of fun connecting to so many great people!

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