You may or may not know that I’m a software engineer by day. That’s my full-time career and I’ve been doing that stuff professionally for 30 years now. But that’s not the half of it. I started programming in the last 70s, so I’ve been at it for longer than dirt. During that time, I did a gig in the Navy for six years as an electronics technician specializing in computer hardware and satellite communications systems. Which means I also do hardware, not just programming. I have a hobby that is off-again, on-again involving digital circuitry. Sometimes I dabble in the subject.

But…

After working all day on solving complex asynchronous database bugs on a large web-based system, I’m pretty much done dealing with computers for the day. Imagine my horror when I run into a corrupt file and have to get it fixed. Yes, we’ve all dealt with that.

I use Scrivener for writing my books because I needed something more powerful than Word, and Word also bogs down on stories that are longer than 30,000 words. Anyway, I had a scene in a story I was writing on the side that was gone. I had written it one day, and two days later, Scrivener complained of the corrupt file, and there was nothing there. Ah, but fortunately, I have a backup system that operates Monday through Friday, each day backing up differences. Fortunately, the copy in the backups was good. Yay.

Then, on Wednesday, I discovered a scene from Desperate Action that was partially corrupt. Fortunately, that book was published a year ago, and there are multiple backups of that book all over the place. So, I was able to grab a previous copy, scrape the text, and put it back where it belonged.

I started to analyze my hard drive and realized that thing is quite old. There was a time when I used to upgrade my desktop every few months. Alternating what got the upgrade. Video card on this day, a month later, a new hard drive, then maybe a new blueray writer, eventually I would run into a problem where I needed a new motherboard to take advantage of new interfaced, so the whole thing would get an upgrade. Now, I just upgrade everything at once and keep it for a few years. The main reason is that I abhor re-installing all my software on a new system. My current system has to be painfully unusable to force me to upgrade anymore.

Fortunately, the hard drive that was giving me fits was my secondary drive. Yes, I’ve gotten smart over the years, and I always use two drives. One for the operating system and all my installed programs, and a larger drive for all of my data. So, when my data drive started to glitch, I just ordered a new one from Amazon. It arrived the next day, I mass-copied everything (it took a good ten hours to finish), then swapped drives. What made it easy was that I have one of those internal hard drive to USB adaptors. So I just used that to plug my new drive in as an external drive, then copied everything. Then, just unplugged the bad drive and put the new drive in. Then, “Bob’s your uncle,” and I’m back in business. Good for another 5 to 8 years. Of course, my C: drive is going to go bad eventually, and that’s going to be a bummer.

My point in all of this is that even we computer geniuses (or the great Oz) have to deal with bad hard drives, corrupt files, and a broken computer at a time when you really didn’t plan for it. And we don’t like fixing them either.

In other news…

My writing life goes on. I added a couple of scenes for book 2 (Survival) so I can connect a subplot with book 3 (Dead End). Book 2’s rough draft is at 78k words right now, and book 3 is only 58k. I’m not sure what will happen after editing, but I know that I still have a lot of words to write for book 3. I have scenes that are not completed, and I have a few scenes that are not started. I also have some things I need to connect together. This really is a sausage factory when you get into it. Fortunately, for this series (trilogy), everything will be tied off by the end of Dead End. There is room for a possible follow-on series or even just a book or two. But for now, I don’t have any plans for future books.

I’m still shooting for mid-March to publish books 2 and 3 of The Traveler trilogy. Then, I’ll run Ads on Facebook to see how they perform. It’ll probably take me a month to collect enough data to see if the trilogy is going to make money or not. If it takes off like hotcakes, then I’ll be looking closer at adding follow-on stories for the trilogy after I finish the Abyss series.

Escape from the Abyss

I’m getting kind of anxious to get back into the Abyss series. It’s funny how I start thinking about another book while I’m in the middle of something. When I was wrapping up The Encounter, all I could think about was how I was going to finish off the two books I’m currently working on. Now I’m thinking about the Abyss series. Not to worry, though. I’m keeping notes of things that pop into my head. That way, when I get back to that series, I won’t be wracking my brain to remember that cool thought I had when I wasn’t working on the next book.

I’m still selling the first book (The Archons) at 99 cents. People keep buying it, and I’m not spending money on Ads, so I’ll leave it there for some time. The price for that book will go back up when I get book 5 published. The reason I plan to do that is to get statistics on Ads for the series with the next book completed. This will determine if I’ll write two books and end it or more than two. I have a lot of material for plenty of books, but book one doesn’t convert very well, and the read-through is not good from books 1 to 2. That’s the risk of writing a long series. If book one doesn’t sell, then the whole series doesn’t do well. Also, if one book in the middle is weak, then the rest of the series doesn’t sell.

We’ll see what happens. It’s probably going to be a bumpy ride…