As I type this, two ginormous generators on an equal number of gooseneck trailers across the street roar so loud I’m forced to wear the ear protection usually reserved for shooting large firearms. On the backs of those same trailers are four five-hundred-gallon tanks full of water and some foamy solution designed to remove paint from brick.
The house across the street is the target of my ire, along with the steady hiss of pressurized water spewing from the ends of two power washing wands wielded by a pair of very wet workers. It’s part of an ongoing saga of renovations over there, and as John Gilstrap can attest from the last time he visited over a year ago, the residence in question looks like someone with no sense style had been watching wayyyy too much HGTV.
I think the house was a front for nefarious businesses. Honestly, I believe they were cooking meth over there. Strange things went on behind those closed doors after we moved here five years ago. I seldom saw the same people more than a couple of times in the four years after we bought this house. Strangers came and went. The blinds were always closed, and it usually looked as if no one lived there.
Then it sold, and the new owners brought in 30-yard dumpsters, and stripped the interior down to the studs. Ignoring the architectural styles of the neighborhood, they remodeled everything into some ghastly ultra-modern Scandinavian design with a wide glass front door the size you’d find at one end of a car dealership’s showroom.
Without approval from the HOA, they sprayed the exterior bright white, making it the only painted residence in our neighborhood of naturally colored brick. It stood out like a sore thumb, required Ray Bans to look at it in the bright summer stun, and still hasn’t sold eighteen months later, because the HOA (and this is the only time I will give them props) put a lean on the house until certain conditions were met. Namely, strip off all that garish paint.
That’s what they’re doing right now. Power-washing the paint off a 5,000′ two-story house brick by brick.
The noise and aggravation is one more thing to endure this month, and this leads us to the root of today’s rant and recommendation.
Through this summer, I hammered out the first 40,000 words on my latest western horror novel, Buck’s Lament, and on a creative roll, retreated to the Cabin for a week by myself to gain another fifteen. Coming home, I went to town on the downhill side of the manuscript (Texan lingo meaning to do something in a detailed and enthusiastic way).
On Monday, words flowed into the laptop from my fingertips. The story moved forward with startling twists as the plot continued to develop on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. During those four days, all those subconscious connections James Scott Bell was talking about a few days ago here on Killzone found themselves and i wrote with feverish glee at how well it read.
Those who know me can tell you that I don’t outline, so it was all stream of consciousness, and it worked!
Then I stuck on some bit of western history, and went to the Google for the information. Typing key words into the search engine, I found a safe link I’d used before and hit Enter.
A dozen screens popped up, one over the other so fast I couldn’t read them, before it froze up and refused to respond. On top of that, a warning came up that I didn’t quite understand. Trying not to panic, I dialed up the makers of my laptop. For the next hour, we discussed my dilemma and technical support finally suggested that I should shut everything down and reboot this infernal machine.
It worked, and all came back…except for what I’d written the last four days. Seven. Thousand. Words. They were just gone.
But that can’t happen! My iDrive automatically backs up to the Cloud. It should all be there.
Sick at my stomach, I again reached out to tech support and the helpful expert figuratively shrugged. “I can’t tell you what happened.”
I called a friend who lives on computers. He came over and three hours later, delivered the bad news. “For some reason, you were disconnected from the Cloud. Nothing has backed up since Sunday.”
With a sick feeling in my stomach, I swallowed down a wave of despair. “So it really is all gone.”
“I’m afraid so.” He went to work, beating back all the electronic gremlins he could find and got me going again, but for days afterward I couldn’t make myself type a word. All those descriptions, the twists, and especially the Pulitzer prize-winning dialog, was gone.
Following those twenty-year-old footsteps in my own imaginary ashes when an electronic hiccup took my entire first novel, I spent the next week re-writing those seven thousand words from memory. I’m sure I missed many details, but the scenes were still fresh in my mind. Maybe these new pages look like the ones floating around somewhere in an electronic heaven, but I’ll never know.
I wish I could tie my troubles in a gunny sack and throw them over the edge, but that’s just the line from a Guy Clark song.
So, the purpose of this discussion is to urge you all not to rely on just one backup method, no matter how good they say it is. I won’t go into the myriad methods to save your work, because I can’t tell you what’s best.
An exterior hard drive?
Had one. It failed.
Download to a thumb drive.
Check. Did that, but it also failed and when I bought this machine, they said the Cloud would never let me down. I know it wasn’t the electronic netherworld, it was a strange disconnect between this infernal machine and that little storm cloud icon at the top of this screen that I never would have imagined.
One of the support techs I spoke to on the phone said to use Time Machine. “You’ll never lose your work again.”
Probably should, but I don’t have the time or inclination to learn more technology. Then again, that’s what they said about the connection between this device and the Cloud.
My grown daughters insist I should use Google Docs. They say it will never fail. I’ll give that a look once I’m finished with this manuscript, but not right now.
I save as I go again, even though it’s supposed to do that for me, and at the end of the day I send the entire manuscript to myself through email. That one has never failed me.
I hope this never happens to any one of you, and I also mean the generators that I’m beginning to think will be outside my office window until the end of September.
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Kill Zoners – Are any of these familiar? Are these models useful in your day-to-day world? Have you applied them? Don’t be shy about commenting!
Like bang for your buck? I have a 
