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November 01, 2005

Computer Karma

Have you ever had an idea that was so brilliant, you simply had to stop what you were doing and write it down, just to make sure it wouldn't get lost? Or carried it out immediately to make sure it wouldn't be forgotten? Have you ever had something so wonderful that the only way to get it out of your head was to carry it out? Have you ever felt the elation of thinking up something that must be shared?

In short: have you ever become obsessed with something spawned from your own mind?

I've been writing for years now, and sometimes this happens, usually with a chapter or story arc in some part of my work. Recently, I was mentally struck by an entire book. I don't mean I had an idea for a book, that's nothing special. What happened was that out of the ideas one rose up and blossomed and spread so that it was not only an idea, but filled out into all of the components. Every subplot, every character's role, grew into it over the course of a day, and by the time I was ready to sit down the piece had grown to fill every corner of my mind, like some rogue computer program that co-opts the system resources until there's little room for anything else. And when that moment hits, you strike out with zeal, with obsession. You have to get this thing down while it's still there, before it fades like fairy gold in the rising sun. Plus, you've got to get it out of your head!

I try to write five days a week. On a day when I do write, it's at least five hundred words. More often its around fifteen hundred. On a good day, it's three thousand. Once I started on this particular project, I was running at an average of six thousand... and this is during the work week... when I'm working overtime. Because the biggest pain in the ass when you're in this state is that going from mind to page cannot be done fast enough. I would sit down immediately upon arrival at home and begin working, eating at my computer... or simply not eating at all. I didn't even leave to watch Jason Lee in My Name Is Earl, which I never miss, about a guy who discovers karma and decides to make up for all of his mistakes. It's kind of like a Kevin Smith movie without the four letter words and the lesbians. Lee's country tone somehow manages to emphasize the whole point: "Do good things and good things happen. Do bad things and they'll come back to haunt you. It's called karma. My name is Earl."

But alas, there is no time for Earl; words must be flushed from my head. "Write your first draft out by hand first to feel the words," says those stupid creative writing courses. Bullshit! You know how long it takes to write with a pen or pencil compared to a keyboard? Well let me tell you, a keyboard is still not fast enough. Dictation is not fast enough. What is in your mind needs to get out. You need to be able to write at the speed of thought, because that's how quickly the words come together, and if you take too long they may get lost, because there's a press of words coming up behind them. You don't waste thoughts at this point; whatever's there, whatever's ready, it must be let loose. It doesn't matter if you're coming in in the middle of a scene in chapter seven and the ending's not ready; you're not writing any of that stuff, you're writing what you have! You're getting down the bits you have to make room for other stuff later.

So you're going and going and going and going and it's still not fast enough. There isn't enough time! Every obstacle, no matter how small, is as infuriating as that guy in front of you in line who seems to have no idea where he is or why he's there or what kind of transaction he and the clerk are about to engage in. And then finds coupons. For different products. That are expired. And then wants to pay with a check. Ever been in a comparable situation? Now imagine that everything feels that way. I ask that of you so you understand what happened next.

The rough outline was in an Excel spreadsheet, with each part given a numerical value so I could skip around and still keep the pieces organized. But every little obstacle was a pain, including making new empty text documents in the folder to number and then start writing in. Sure, making one only takes, what fifteen to twenty seconds, but add that up over the course of a book, and that's like half an hour lost that could be better spent emptying things out of my head! Action was required.

I started learning Visual Basic back at Oshkosh Truck because, honestly, there was nothing else to do all frickin' day. After four+ years of growth, I've got a great deal of it down cold. So I knew that I could have all those blank text documents made in less than a minute.

Sub aaaaa()
For X = 1 to 60
A="C:\temp\"+Format(X)+".txt"
Open A for output as #1
Write #1,""
Close #1
Next X
End Sub

And voila! It'll make sixty properly numbered blank text documents in the temp folder. Easy as 3.14. I mean, I could tell it not to make the ones that I already have, but it would take longer... and things just aren't going fast enough. That's why I was careless on that third line and left off the "C:\temp\" part of the code, which was why the program didn't make them in the temp folder, it made them in the folder where the Excel file was... the folder where all the previously written parts are.

I am such a careful person with my data. I keep back-ups on floppies, CD's, DVD's, of all my important stuff. If I'm even going to alter an important document, I'll first save an archived version of it in case I need a previous iteration. For Christmas, my present to myself is likely going to be an external back-up drive. But it doesn't matter that you put on your seatbelt every time you get into your car if the one time you don't is the one time you're in an accident. The cold world doesn't care if you slipped up just once, the fact is, you slipped up. And I didn't back up my work; I seriously slipped up.

I didn't even delete them, that's the worst part. I opened them, erased them, saved them, and closed them, all in the fraction of a second. Finding deleted files is actually fairly easy; finding previous iterations of altered files... that's the problem. And there were so many things I almost did that would have helped. I was going to throw them on a floppy, but time was getting away. I was archiving on a CD, but I was running late for work. I was going to roll them all into a document for a word count, but decided it'd be a waste of time that could be spent writing. I was going to write the code to skip those files I'd already made, but wanted to do it the quick way.

As I laid in bed that night, Jason Lee appeared, tipped his hat and said "Do bad things and they'll come back to haunt you. It's called karma. My name is Earl."

And so that leaves off with a fairly big question mark. It wasn't that the work was lost... it was that the words were lost. Like I said, I wrote it to get it out of my head. And it was out, and in my hands, and in my idiocy I killed it. It's not like building a house of cards and the house collapses, you've also lost the deck in the process, and you're not sure you're ever going to find it again!

With little hope I struck out on the path of data recovery, but like I said, they're built around finding deleted files, not altered ones. Failure after grim failure sapped my will to continue with the project... maybe it was best to let the story die. Then, literally my last effort, I found WinHex. It's not a data recovery program, it's a computer forensic tool that scans the data sitting on the hard drive, regardless of structure to it. And that, my friends, is when clean living pays off. I partition my drives, so the area in question was relatively small, and I optimize every partition each month like clockwork. With a couple hours work of sifting over the flotsam of the drive, I was able to reconstruct ninety percent of what I'd lost. If I hadn't done either of those things, odds are I would have either overwritten that data while downloading data recovery programs, or had the data so fragmented that finding it would be impossible. Computer karma swings both ways. The spirit of Jason Lee arrived and gave me a thumbs up: "Do good things and good things happen. My name is Earl."

Posted by Chuck at November 1, 2005 07:27 AM

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