Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Perils of technology's advance

I've discovered that several of my earlier stories, short fiction written in 1996 or earlier, somehow failed to make the migration from one computer to another over the past decade or so. Most of these aren't ever going to sell. They're interesting snapshots of my evolution as a writer--competent technical approaches to stories that are uniformly run-of-the-mill clichés. Apart from some ragged printouts that miraculously managed to find their ways into my file cabinet, they only exist in electronic form on a handful of floppy discs. Old floppy discs. That my current compute can't read, since it lives on a diet of CD-Roms and Zip discs.

So I drag out my old, old, old PC, the one with the floppy drive. It crashes. Repeatedly. I find the story files, eventually. And learn, to my chagrin, that they're in a word processor format unreadable by either my current Word Perfect or MS Word. I'd thought I'd transferred over all those old files years ago. I thought wrong.

Which is no great tragedy, except that there's one story in particular from those dark ages that was too ambitious for my skills at the time. Reach exceeding grasp and all that. Now, however, I think I can make it work, and there's a market opening for it as well. But instead of merely doing a thorough editing, I get to rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Labor intensive. Time consuming. Reinventing the wheel. Bother.

Now Playing: John Mellencamp Big Daddy

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