Jan 30, 2012

Write to the Death!

Some of you may know already, but for those who have not heard, my computer was attacked yesterday by a virus. It was a nasty one, real nasty, like the little growly ankle biter dog that gets your calf as soon as you laugh at its diminutive size and turn your back on it. The kind you want to take a shower after dealing with. Or stab yourself in the face for not backing up your work more frequently. Ok, so I don’t really want to stab myself in the face, not only would that hurt, but it would make it difficult to write with my brain pain split open. Don’t worry, my calf will heal, I have thick skin.

Long story short, I spent hours battling the virus to save all of my work, which included the Weapons Weekly blogs I had written for the next few weeks. So this week, I will be very late, if I post a Weapons Weekly at all. I did not win the battle and in the end, I killed the virus, but he took every one of my documents with him. All of the blogs will have to be rewritten and researched.

If not for having two flash drives that I stored a few things on previously, it would have been a total loss. The last thing I want to do is go back to square one on writing Devil Dog. It was 348 pages before today. The backed up copy is only 311, but that not too bad. I’ll have that fixed in no time. The biggest loss was losing all of my work on Devil Dog 2 and mostly everything on the Warlord.

Another big loss was my spreadsheet where I jotted down ideas for books and sorted them by series and over the last year and a half I worked out their plots and how they tie into the series for easy reference later. Somehow, in all my infinite wisdom of planning years ahead, I forgot to back this spreadsheet up. It is gone and the chaos in my head will have to be worked out and organized all over again.

All in all, I have no idea where my computer has been going at night or what kind of computers he’s been plugging in with, but apparently he caught a pretty aggressive bug and now he has amnesia. Tonight I will take another crack at finding my files and restoring my software. If it’s a loss, I’ll just rebuild, like a redneck living in a trailer in tornado alley. “I ain’t movin! Ima rebuild!” (I actually know these people.)

I had three more pieces on Aztecs, but two were pretty tough to get information on. I can’t help but wonder if the virus didn’t get in while I was searching photos for those two weapons on random sites. That fear is why I’m dropping those two weapons for another day and I’ll just wrap up the Aztecs culture next and move onto the next warrior.

See you soon, I will probably do some book recommendations this week and get back on the Weapon’s Weekly next Monday. Have a great week everyone! I smile in the face of disaster, only I can let myself fail, no virus will destroy my dreams. I live by the motto “Write or Die” and I sure as hell mean it. I tried living without writing for years. I'm not going back to that ever.

6 comments:

  1. Nooooo. Im so sorry. A virus is an authors worst nightmare. Hoping hoping hoping that you get it all eradicated and all your material saved.

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  2. Thanks! Looks like the virus is dead, but my laptop is a mess. It shows my files are gone, but my virus scanner keeps scanning them, so there's some hope for a 100% full recovery, then it's a matter of bringing the laptop itself back to life. It's amazing what erasing drivers will do to an operating system.

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  3. OMG! I got chills reading this because I've lost stuff before too, and I know how bad it sucks. I actually kept my computer at school when I taught. Someone broke into the building over the weekend and stole it. This was in the days when there was no such thing as Time Machine or back-up servers. I lost literally everything I'd ever done. It was truly devastating. I cried for days.

    I feel for you, man. I hope you're able to get at least some of it back. :-(

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    1. That's horrible. I think that's worse than a virus. At least I know where everything is. Stolen is just gone. :(

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  4. Ugh, sorry to hear about the troubles! I'm always paranoid about losing stuff and I back up my stories on my server a couple a times a month (I really should find a service that automatically does such things daily). I had a virus take down my PC a few years ago (I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the OS, and it was still a mess), and that was the last Windows straw for me. I made the switch to Macs after that. I'm sure things can happen to Macs too, but I haven't had a single problem like that since then.

    Anyhoo, good luck. I hope you're able to recover your files.

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    1. It's good to have tech savvy friends. Everything has been recovered 100%. The issue now is what you mentioned about the reformatting. It's a big mess to clean up. Almost done now and I decided a year ago, after all the trouble I've had with this Dell, I will try a Mac next time.

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