Saturday, April 28, 2012

Back in Black.

I was tempted to start this blog post with a copy/paste of the lyrics to that legendary rock tune.  However, I decided at the last minute that while I'm not above puns so bad they make me groan as I'm writing them, I'm not quite that cliché.

As anyone following my Twitter account knows, I've had some computer trouble this week.  To wit, my copy of Windows ate itself during a driver update for my video card, and since I stored a lot of things on the desktop, a direct reinstall was not advised since it might wipe out everything stored on the desktop.  As this could potentially wipe out things running the gamut from pictures friends had sent me up to thirteen years ago to my entire collection of mp3s to, perhaps most important for anyone reading this, everything I'd written over the last fifteen years, I decided not to take the risk.

This meant I had to back up all the important stuff from the hard drive without a working OS on the drive.  Since I've worked some freelance PC repair over the last few years I had an external adapter and backed up the most vital data on a microSD card via a borrowed laptop.

But only after knocking the hard drive to the floor AS it was energized: IE, spinning.

There was some data corruption, but I recovered almost everything I couldn't replace.  Luckily, this included everything from master copies and rough/early drafts of Subject 12 and The Grand Granger to what I've written of Rogue and the followup to The Grand Granger, which I'm calling The Princess Diamonda Incident at the moment.  I may change it, depending on feedback.  I haven't verified the files yet, other than TPDI to see if there was any corruption, but I'm going to take it on faith that, because these files are so small, the ECC capability of the hardware saved them.

I'm now running again on a 2TB Seagate hard disc that I hope doesn't have any of the issues plaguing a lot of the manufacturers since the flood in Thailand last year.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

So, on to more savory things.  First off, I am already back at work.  While I've had to put Rogue on hold again (I'll explain more about that in a later blog entry if I get any questions regarding it), I am hard at work on the followup to The Grand Granger.  I refuse to put a completion date on it, but I will say that with luck it'll be published before August.  At that point I'm planning on dropping the price of The Grand Granger out of the 70% royalty zone (check earlier blog posts if you have any questions about that), but I'll be doing another 1-day giveaway to drum up interest in the sequel.  I don't plan on letting anything slip about it at this juncture, but I will say that if you read The Grand Granger you'll probably enjoy it a lot more, but it should stand entirely on its own.  The same could not be said for Rogue which will require having read Subject 12 in order to get the most enjoyment out of it -- but as I'm having extreme difficulty with getting from where I am in the story to the later scenes I have all planned and scripted, I cannot say that it's really that important at the moment.

I want to apologize for not responding to the blog comments personally at this time.  The reason being I've been busy, under the weather, and have had issues with my computer and smartphone for weeks now.  I think I can attribute some of the PC issues to the failing hard drive/Windows install, but the cell phone problems are because I can't leave well enough alone and keep upgrading the firmware whenever possible.  As such I like to use early release, bleeding-edge if you prefer, versions of the firmware and things often don't work as they should the first time -- or begin lagging/developing issues under stress.  So, I want to take a moment here and thank both commenters for their feedback.  I will reply to future comments, and that's a promise, whenever possible.

I'll try to post again sooner than I have this time.  Thanks for reading and for your support!