A Blast from the Past...

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Just a little story about my writing process...or not, lol.

Last week I had a chat with a friend who is a published author and a supporter of new writers.  Something came up in our conversation that hit a nerve and I suddenly remembered A Thing I had started writing back when my kids were small.

I gave her a quick -ish- synopsis of the story and she strongly encouraged me to pull it out and finish it.

She asked me how many words I'd written and.. I had no idea.  I was, however, pretty sure everything I've ever written was somewhere in my writing folder under my documents.  I'd been pretty careful to make sure to move stuff over.

So the next day, whilst My Sweet Babboo was on a camping trip, I sat down to the computer and pulled up the writing folder.

Nothing.

I poked around a while in some other folders.

Still nothing.

I ran searches on key words and...still nothing.

I looked on our backup drive. More nothing.

Somehow, that file didn't get transferred over to this computer.  It may not even have been on the previous one.

Rats.  Could I re-write it?  

As I was heading to bed that night, I suddenly remembered that there is a physical folder in the filing cabinet with some of my old writing in it.  Maybe...

The next day, I looked and, lo and behold, there it was.

Y'all.  That is CONTIUNOUS FEED paper from a DOT MATRIX printer.  I knew it was old, but I didn't know it was THAT old.  And the backup is apparently on that old floppy disc.  I'd written it on the very first computer we owned... a hand-me-down Apple IIc.  I suspect the files weren't compatible with the Windows machine we replaced it with.

Only about half of what I wrote is on the printout, but what is there is a hoot.

Nobody has a cell phone.  The protagonist checks her phone messages.  They rent a movie from Blockbuster.   She made coffee from those little single-serving tea-bag thingies (remember those?).

I am going to see if a local Old Computer Tech company can extract the files from the floppy disc...but, wow, there's a LOT of work that needs doing, lol. The basic plot is not affected by the time period but all those details...

Or maybe I'll just leave it set in the 90's and call it a creative choice, lol.  

But first to see if the files can be salvaged.