Last week I knocked a glass of water into my MacBook keyboard. The screen went blank immediately. I mopped and dried and waited to no avail. My laptop was dead and I envisioned two years of work going up in smoke.
I thought I was safe because I saved my work every so often to a thumb drive and kept it at a remote location. Not so. The version of Rim to Rim, my completed manuscript, on the memory stick was a month old. Editing is an on-going process for me. The loss of my notes and outline for my current novel, Wolf Pack, worried me most. I didn't know how to replace the work I'd done.
I knew that the longer moisture sat on the circuits, the worse the damage would be. The next morning I hurried to the Apple store and waited five hours for an appointment with a computer genius. I confessed my clumsiness and he expressed his sympathies. He examined the laptop and quickly determined that circuits were corroded and the unit had sustained Stage 4 damage––the logic board, the casing, the trackpad and MagSafe. $750. My only question was . . . Can you save my memory? He wasn't sure.
The young man with the black gauges perforating his ear lobes was wonderful. He said that since I hadn't lied to him about how the damage occurred, he'd waive the charges . . . the entire $750! Wow. So I bought a external hard drive for $89 and asked him to transfer whatever memory he could onto it before sending the damaged laptop out for repair.
The memory transferred successfully and saved me from worry and dread during the week without my laptop. Let this be a lesson:
1) Back up your work frequently
2) Save current versions of your work on memory sticks and store them at
different locations.
3) Send an e-mail to yourself with your files attached and leave it unopened in
your mailbox. You can retrieve it by logging in from a different computer
4) Buy an external hard drive which saves your work and automatically up-dates
itself -- cheap insurance.
5) Never lie to an Apple computer genius.
Have you experienced a computer damage horror stories ? What do you do to safe-guard your precious work?
Monday, August 22, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Are Webinars for You?
One of the perks of membership in Mystery Writers of America - Midwest are the occasional free webinars they offer to help improve your writing skills. Claire Applewhite, author of The Wrong Side of Memphis, St Louis Hustle, and Candy Cadillac as well as several romance novels, hosted a three-part instructional series entitled Fifty Ways to Kill Your Lover.
After the initial conference call, each of the ten writers who had signed up for the series wrote a five-page set-up for a short story making sure to include characterization, dialogue, setting, plot, conficts and pacing. The hard part for me was envisioning the arc of the story.... where is this thing going? How will it ever come to a climax? What the heck is plot?
So I just started writing.... "Alecia Hunter had legs that could stop traffic and often did." I envisioned the martini bar she stopped in after work; its smells, sounds, and feel. I envisioned the co-workers she might confide in and what they might say. I envisioned how she'd react if her lover walked in hand in hand with a buxom blond. Before I knew it I filled five pages.
Claire briefly critiqued our five-page story set-ups during the webinar and discussed conflicts, tension, and climax. After the half-hour webinar, Claire assigned us each a writing partner. Mary from Tennessee and I will exchange our beginning five pages and then write the endings to each other's stories. I hope I can do justice to Mary's story set-up.
Next week we'll e-mail the ten pages to Claire and receive a critique during the next webinar.
The Webinar technology impresses me. The log-in process was easy. The voice quality was excellent, the slide presentation was clear, and the response time to our questions was quick. It's a great way to connect to writers in other states and to get an experienced author to comment on your writing skills.
If you paid your dues for any organization, take advantage of any benefits they may offer. There appears to be many established authors in the industry who are willing to give their time to help the pre-published authors among us. Have any of you found useful free perks to suggest?
After the initial conference call, each of the ten writers who had signed up for the series wrote a five-page set-up for a short story making sure to include characterization, dialogue, setting, plot, conficts and pacing. The hard part for me was envisioning the arc of the story.... where is this thing going? How will it ever come to a climax? What the heck is plot?
So I just started writing.... "Alecia Hunter had legs that could stop traffic and often did." I envisioned the martini bar she stopped in after work; its smells, sounds, and feel. I envisioned the co-workers she might confide in and what they might say. I envisioned how she'd react if her lover walked in hand in hand with a buxom blond. Before I knew it I filled five pages.
Claire briefly critiqued our five-page story set-ups during the webinar and discussed conflicts, tension, and climax. After the half-hour webinar, Claire assigned us each a writing partner. Mary from Tennessee and I will exchange our beginning five pages and then write the endings to each other's stories. I hope I can do justice to Mary's story set-up.
Next week we'll e-mail the ten pages to Claire and receive a critique during the next webinar.
The Webinar technology impresses me. The log-in process was easy. The voice quality was excellent, the slide presentation was clear, and the response time to our questions was quick. It's a great way to connect to writers in other states and to get an experienced author to comment on your writing skills.
If you paid your dues for any organization, take advantage of any benefits they may offer. There appears to be many established authors in the industry who are willing to give their time to help the pre-published authors among us. Have any of you found useful free perks to suggest?
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