The Lost and The Found
Have you ever worked really hard on something only to have it disappear never to be seen again?
Have you ever had that gut-wrenching feeling that something you loved creating would never see the light of day? This is what happened to me about ten years ago. I changed from using a mac to a pc (I know). My old mac died and the plug converter broke. Since it was such an old school mac I could not find another converter. When that mac died it took with it around six years of writing. Imagine if you had spent two years writing a book and three of those were lost which added up to six years worth of work. What made it worse was five scripts also disappeared into dead digital ether. Yes I did do back up files; however, this was at a time when windows could not convert to the coding effectively and I ended up with pages of what appeared to be Greek letters. What made it worse was that I had put my heart and soul into those three books.
Well after my holiday in Thailand, I had a real craving for one of the books. To the point that I considered writing the whole thing again from scratch. It is odd really because a book is part of you until you release it to the world. It is only by experiencing completion, that you feel free to move on. I don't know whether this happens for other authors. These three books have been niggling me over the last year. They have been lurking in my unconscious desiring completion. What could I do?
Well the last couple of weeks I have been off work with Deep Vein Thrombosis. The advice was to keep moving rather than sit around. So in my time off, which I don't have that much of, I decided on simplicity. On holiday I had read about Simplicity and it resonated to the point where it felt like the way forwards. So what did I do? I cleared and cleaned and then cleared some more. There was such a sense of release and I feel I have developed anti-stuffism. Think about it - what does an author really need? So while I was clearing out I found my old back up C.D's and gazed upon them sadly. I considered just binning them; however, I thought I would put them on my old laptop and transfer the files to my hard drives. I then looked at the files and thought - I should give conversion one last try. My old files were CWK files which I wanted as DOCS. Well I typed this into Google and a fabulous chap had miraculously provided a step by step guide and guess what? They all converted almost perfectly. Honestly the joy I felt about resurrecting those books and knowing they could be completed and released was beyond comprehension. I felt as though I had had a huge lottery win. I know.... I literally jumped around with joy because I had loved writing those books. There was one in particular that was such a fun book. So now I simply have to do a final edit and three more of my fun fictions can enter the digital publishing world. That in itself is completion and I often wonder whether these books purposely chose to be dormant. The reason I say this was that one of the books talks about survival (it's a children's book) and over the last five years my brother has become obsessed with survival skills. He talks endlessly about it. So much so I could probably survive on a remote island through his repetitious conditioning. I even purchased a fire stick just in case... Yep - I really did that and it still resides amongst my minimalist possessions. So all that he has talked about can be written into the book before release. With all that is mind I am celebrating... the discovery of my lost novels and the release of THE HAIRY-LEGGED MYSTERY, which comes out tomorrow.
In celebration of all of the above - I have put my Kindle books on COUNTDOWN DEALS from the 25th May 2016 Yipee!
LINK TO AMAZON KINDLE: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruby-Allure/e/B00M9Y4GAA/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1464019564&sr=8-1
