Sunday, 26 February 2017

It's a plot to make me feel old.

I'm fully aware that I didn't crawl out of my shell a month ago. And my shaving mirror in the morning reminds me that I'm not exactly in the first flushes of youth, but the world seems bent on making me out to be some kind of antediluvian relic.
    Why?
    I may have mentioned that I'm rewriting the second novel wot I ever rit. The only problem is that I lost half of it a long time ago when I moved back to England. And now, after 177 pages I've come to the end of what I have and I've completely forgotten what happened next.
    Well just write keep writing and it might all come back to you; or just write a new and exciting end, you might say. It's not as if I'm not without some experience after fifteen completed novels.
     The thing is, though, I have a vague memory that the original end was exactly how I wanted it - even though although I can't remember how.
    Now, back to the plot to annoy me. After rummaging around in the chaos that is my garage I found an original MS on a floppy disc, written in Word 2a. I know, a bit old and the 386 computer upon which it was written (the first PC I ever built) rusted away to nothing nearly two decades ago. But when I went to a computer shop the other day and asked if they had an external floppy drive, even the manager, the sixth person they questioned, gave me a look of utter vacancy.
    "A what?" he asked as if I was demanding something like the egg of a Golden Orc or a piece of the missing link. His smile of disbelief, when I explained, nearly earned him a sore nose.
    I'll find one. I really will. But then when I do and look at it, if I find that what's on there is the same as I have now, I'm going to scream and scream until I'm sick.



Two hours later.
I found a floppy disc reader - good old Maplins. And guess what, the floppy had even less of the book than I had on my computer. What a waste of thirty quid. Rats!

2 comments:

  1. I have an external floppy drive, and I smile every time I see it (or the stack of disks I just can't bear to part with). I remember when they stopped putting them in computers - I was at a loss as to how you would transfer information without them. And now when I think about how much my flash drive will hold compared to those floppy disks (or the zip disk I still have somewhere), it blows my mind (and makes me feel a bit antique).

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  2. I don't feel antique. My daughter says I am, and what was it like living in the twenties before colour was invented, she asked with a sneer.
    She's gonna get a slap.

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