You didn’t have a backup.  Or your backup got destroyed also by clever hackers or Tom Cruise.  Now all your photos, documents, and–most importantly–that novel you’ve been working on for two and a half years, are all…gone.  Leaving you pounding the ground and cursing the heavens while the skeletal remains of the Statue of Liberty stare down at you from above.

But sometimes gone isn’t really gone.

You see, computers are lazy.  When you say to delete something from the drive, instead of actually getting down on its hands and knees and scrubbing out the files, your computer just deletes the map entry that tells it where the file is.  It’s sort of like removing the book from the card catalog but leaving the actual book on the shelf.  (or, for you interwebz kidz out there, like removing the entry from Google Maps but forgetting to knock the building down.  Or something.)  The computer doesn’t actually overwrite the original file until it needs the space to write a new one.

So, when you delete something from a hard drive, even if you wipe the whole hard drive and re-install your system, the original files may still be there.

How do you get it back?  There are some handy dandy little programs that can help you with that.  They basically look behind the file map that the system keeps and examine the data that’s still left there on the drive.

I’ve personally used Data Rescue on my own hard drives before to recover my documents from a crashed computer, as well as grab photos from a memory card that I had stupidly formatted before backing up (more than once), and every time I’ve managed to get back what I thought I’d really truly lost this time.

If you don’t want to spend any money (but if anything’s worth shelling out for, I’d think this is), Lifehacker has also posted a list of free data recovery programs.  Note that I haven’t tried any of those programs so I can’t vouch for them.

Remember, it’s not over until your hard drive is reduced to a burnt cinder.

So next time you nuke your novel, or deep-six the photos from your once-in-a-lifetime trip to paradise, don’t despair, and don’t give up.  Try out some of these data recovery programs.  Chances are pretty good that you’ll be able to get at least some of your data back.

PS: Teachers, please ignore this post.  Nothing in here is actually true.  Yes, the computer really did eat your student’s homework.  Trust me.

We had been living in Phoenix for the last couple of years, having moved down there for my job.  The biggest problem I have with Phoenix is the weather.  There is none.

For those who haven’t been there, I should say that it’s not 100+ degrees all year round.  There is only about two months or so in the middle of Summer when it’s that hot.  The rest of the year, the temperature is basically hovering in the middle of nowhere.  It’s not hot.  It’s not cold.  And the air doesn’t move.  No wind, no breeze.  So it just ends up feeling…meh.

For people who can’t stand cold, this is great.  I grew up with weather though, and I like to have some rainy days and snowy days and sunny days and overcast ones.  When you enter Phoenix, it’s like time stands still, not moving forward, the seasons not really changing, until you finally leave.

The other reason we were eager to leave Phoenix was all of our family is in the Saint Louis area, so it’s a two and a half days drive away to visit family.  With our family expanding (next post), we didn’t like being so far away, or getting to visit so seldom.

That’s why, when given the chance to move to Colorado, to the Denver office, I jumped on it.  Piled everything in the back of a truck, Beverly Hillbillies style, and moved up the mountain.

We’ve been here about a month, and I have to say, I love it here.  We’ve had three snowfalls already, and in-betweentimes it’s been sunny nice spring/fall weather.  So we’re definitely seeing the variety.  We’ve already made friends with the neighbors (never really talked to our neighbors in AZ) and have already made one trip back to St. Louis to visit family.

Not to mention it’s really nice to have Bob Ross scenery decorating the background everyday.

So this has definitely been a move that’s worthwhile.  It’s been a busy time (more in the next post) but now it’s settled down and we can ‘relax’ a little…for the next couple weeks.

A few years ago my Mother-in-law gave me a typewriter for Christmas.  She knew I had studied scriptwriting in college and had wanted to be a writer years ago.  And a few months before I had made some admiring remarks upon finding an typewriter stashed away somewhere, although it was electric.

She did her research.  She Googled and Yahoo’d typewriters and found the ones that were known for being good writing machines.  She wanted to find one that was not only a good ‘writer’s machine’, but looked classy.

She settled on the Royal Quiet Deluxe because not only was it a good looking machine, but Hemmingway famously  swore by Royal portables.  She found a beautiful black and chrome Royal Quiet Deluxe from 1947 in an antique store.

When I opened my present on Christmas day, I was floored.  It was beautiful and chrome-plated.  More importantly, it worked perfectly.

I kept the machine on the dining room table, except for putting it away when it was time to eat.  I kept running pages through it and writing out short scenes and pieces of stories.

Eventually, I took to the internet, checking some of the same sites she had given me from her research, to see about a user manual and ribbons.

I was surprised to find web sites and even a whole Yahoo! groups forum dedicated to the collection of typewriters.  I started reading about the machines, fascinated by their brilliant mechanical intracacy.

More importantly, I started using the machine to write.

Eventually I started looking up machines on ebay and craigslist, picking up a few other neglected old machines.  Now I collect typewriters.  It’s not too weird.  A friend collects ink pens (and there are plenty of typewriter collectors who also collect fountain pens and other writing paraphanalia).  Also, Tom Hanks is a prolific typewriter collector.  He has over 200 stashed away at home.  So my dozen or so machines is surely no big deal.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of various things: photography, driving a truck, marketing, eventually my current job as a computer programmer.  The one thing I have not managed to do in all these careers is write.

In the last year, though, I have started picking up the pencil again, and getting the kinks out of the literary muscles.  I have come to find again how much I love to write, and have decided that I need to just go for it, and finally dedicate myself to the career I want to have.

Having done my warm-up laps, I took a look around at the writing world today, and I realized that I probably couldn’t have picked a more confusing time to try and jump in.

There are Kindles and iPads, e-books and print-on-demand.  J. A. Konrath is preaching the new religion on the corner and the publishers are on the 27th floor trying to keep the building from coming down.

Clearly this is an industry in turmoil.

As a new writer stepping into this chaos, it is more than a little daunting.  Should I even try and get ‘traditionally’ published any more?  Or should I try and self-publish.  Do I still need an agent?  Should I focus on getting on bookshelves or just ride the e-book wave?  Where is the middle ground?

Maybe this blog will server as a question as well as an answer, for someone who asks, “I want to write…so now what?”