The Impermanence of Virtuality

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This is a really quick post, as I’m headed to Fencon.  I’ll report on the con this evening.  However, because A Touch of Night (with Sofie) my Pride and Prejudice and Dragons book — is free on Amazon right now — I meant to post here the beginning of my “elf prince Darcy” story as sort of a sop to you guys (and a joke, too.  So you see how weird I get.)  And while I couldn’t even remember what I named it, or where it might be on my computer, I thought, “Not a problem.”  I’ll search the Derbyshire Writers’ Group archive for my name.

So I went there…  And the fan fiction archive is gone.  Now the question is… do I even have it saved anywhere that I can find anymore?  And if not, why not?  And don’t say because I’m dumb.  I know that.
Let that be a lesson to you, guys.  Put not your faith in online groups.  I’ll go and attend the con, now.  Come to the signing if you’re in the area!  It’s at eleven thirty.  And then I’ll look and see if the story is anywhere….

9 thoughts on “The Impermanence of Virtuality”

  3. I worked for a casino sign company designing signs the year they made the transitions to computers. I love computers, but sometimes I miss working on the boards. As bad as I ever screwed up on the boards I never once had the drawing rip itself off the board, tear itself up into confetti and throw itself into the trash.

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  4. For what it’s worth, I find it worth the pennies it costs for the return in peace of mind. I keep ALL of my documents in a single folder. I burn that folder to a CD-R at least once a week. I keep a year’s-worth in one of those Case Logic CD wallets. (Well, several, but you get the idea.)

    This paranoia is brought to you courtesy of my having lost my house key several times in my adolescence while also being convinced my parents weren’t kidding when they said, if I lost the key, they were NOT going to get up in the middle of the night to let me in.

    Good training for being OCD about backups.

    M

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  5. One of my “last ditch” methods for finding something on my computer is searching for files containing …. The “trick” is finding a search string that will be in the file but is not so general that I’ll get an impossible number of “false positives”.

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  6. When Sarah asked for my story “The Star Cats” to publish in her anthology “Something Magic This Way Comes,” I looked for it in my main computer. Not there. I looked in the floppys from my old “lap top” computer. Not there. After some frantic tearing through the hard copies of various stories I had submitted, picturing having to try to rewrite it from scratch, I found one hard copy I had submitted to one of Sarah’s writers’ groups.

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  7. I could have done a search for “Darcy” or perhaps “Lizzy” because those characters only exist in my fan fic. I didn’t because I was running late. I also didn’t have it backed up because… fanfic. Though with the indie publishing I’m starting to see the point of fanfic as making some money, this is very recent. For years and years austen fanfic has been a relaxation thing for me, not part of the “work” writing. So I was mildly amused (and bemused) at finding that austen.com no longer linked to Derbyshire Writers’ Guild. If what I understand from Beth’s link is right (and I honestly don’t know) then the Dwiggies have just separated from austen.com. This tells you how long it’s been since I had time to write/read fanfic, right? Yeah…

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