This week I hit that problem that only happens to creatives; someone made my thing.

You know that idea you had for a novel? Someone wrote it. And it happened twice.

It had not been a good week, anyway. Waves hand at… you know… everything.

But yes, I read two books that matched pretty closely ideas I had ages ago for two different novels. I started writing them and stopped at a good way in and threw them away. Trunked them.

The ideas are not exactly the same. A bunch of writers given the exact same prompt will always write different stories.

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, she talked about a very specific story idea that winged its way over to her friend’s head. She swore they had not discussed it, but perhaps they both saw the same source material? Or they did talk about it and both forgot? She thinks that an idea will bugger off if it thinks you don’t want it. And she might be right, hey, who am I to argue with Elizabeth Gilbert?

Story will find a way, she intones in a serious Ian Malcolm voice.

And of course, my negative self-talk had an excellent week. There were a lot of shoulds, a lot of if onlys, and a lot of nasty words. I know it doesn’t help, but it’s kind of hard to stop it on those days/weeks where you are struggling with other things.

So that’s my week, how about you?

I certainly don’t feel like making a blog post right now… but it seems kind of important to stick to the things I planned to do if I can at all do them.

Does that make sense?

This virus is going to take long weeks or months to beat, and if I let it get to me now, I will freeze in place. And that’s not good for anyone. For me, it feels like the perfect storm of my fears, and I am sure other people feel like that, too. I’ve blogged before about my fears about losing people close to me, or having my kids lose me. And money is always a fear trigger for me.

Our house contact in the CSIRO tells us this pandemic will be over in May if we handle it well. Note: Australia is not handling this well. Our current Prime Minister has demonstrated little leadership in previous crises, and he remains true to form; garbled ad slogan statements that end up confusing everyone. ‘Slow up the spread, you free up the bed.’ ??? What on earth? Especially when in the next sentence he told us to maintain social distance of 1.5-2m apart but that going for a haircut was okay as long as it was under thirty minutes. How long does he think hair scissors are?

Schools are open, but you can only have five people at a wedding and ten at a funeral. So if a teacher dies, their whole class can’t come to their funeral? It’s dumb and confusing. And when people are confused and panicky they do stupid things. Like hoard toilet paper.

Other countries have just paid money into your bank account. The Australian government made the recently jobless queue in the street to register with an underfunded and understaffed government department to get a handout that they won’t see in their account before the second week of April. What are people going to live on? How will they buy food? Or pay their rent or their bills? And winter is coming. Never mind the stupidity of breaking the social distancing to queue for hours. Especially if people are ill. They had to call the police in to make them go home when one office closed.

There isn’t a competent person to replace him if he stood down. His whole party is mired in bad behaviour and corruption cases. Part of the PM’s issue is that he is a Prosperity Christian; you know, the ones who think God hates you if you’re poor. [I don’t think that is Christian.] It seeps into his rhetoric. He described the recently laid off as unemployed ‘through no fault of their own’ which pretty much says that all the other unemployed people are to blame for their situation. Half the country just burnt down. Do you think those people deserved that? The government toyed with a tiered unemployment payment in this crisis. Can you imagine? There would be riots.

And then they closed parliament until August. AUGUST!

This fool will kill us all.

Tragically, this has already meant suicides in my kid’s circle of friends and raised concerns about some others who are in the risk group. Honestly, we have just shafted young people; with no money, no job and with debts and no hope… sometimes people make fatal choices. I want to open my home and my heart to all of them, but I can’t. Kid 2 is immune-compromised these days.

And sadly, the US president is, if anything, worse. I wrote back in November 2016 that people will die ^^ but I had no idea it would be this many people. He just gave himself oversight on a two trillion dollar package. The same man who cannot imagine that soldiers could hand cash out to people without taking a few notes for themselves. I always think people out their own thoughts in what they accuse others of doing.

On the shiny side, and believe me I am desperate to find anything, I make bread and I stocked up on flour before lockdown, so last night we had minestrone with herbs from the garden and hot fresh bread from the breadmaker. Today there is a sourdough loaf in the oven. I got out my sewing machine and made face masks.

I have always meant to get to the cans in the back of the pantry and now I can do that. Yay. Beans and rice is a balanced protein.

And look at that loaf, she’s a beauty.

We’ll get through this. Feel free to message me here or on twitter @mtr_amg if you want to chat.

Links:

^^ https://amgray.blogspot.com/2016/11/people-will-die.html

My garage floods, so everything in it has to be kept up off the floor to avoid water damage. This week Sydney got some absolutely absurd amounts of rainfall and even the things off the floor were not safe. It took me some days to get brave enough to open the door to check on the damage. But yesterday, I got around to it and amassed a pile of stuff that needs to be thrown out.

A lot of the things are electrical and should not be put out in the standard garbage collection.

So, to cut a long story short, I filled the station wagon with old electrical items and various other things, rusted aerosol cans, fire extinguishers and a lone gas bottle – the barbeque went in the trash long ago – and a collection of soft plastics that also can’t go in the normal recycling bin.

Today, I headed off to my local E-waste depot. I drove in, opened the door and the guy came to help me unload. I made some small talk about how I had a few things to get done today.

What I did not know was that as I drove one of the fire extinguishers rolled and the pin fell out of it. He reached in to pick it up by the handles and compressed the firing mechanism.

A cloud of white dust floofed voluminously out the open door of my car.

We stood there. We looked at each other.

He gave me a nervous smile. “Well,” he said, “There’s another job for you.”

I laughed; you’ve gotta laugh. I mean, it was an accident. I will not freak out over it. And I’m lucky it didn’t go off while I was driving.

But the entire car interior is coated in the stuff. And me, once I got back in the car to drive home.

Sighs.

On my Todoist list this week it says ‘apply cpr to website’. It’s my fault it is not alive. I know that. My last post was like March 2019. *makes a face*

But that reminder came up today – thanks, past self – and I am determined to post something. Even if it is a ramble about how unreliable I am.

It’s always hard to get things going again; so much easier to keep them going once they are rolling along. Insert flywheel analogy or stone, moss… you know the rest.

In 2019 I had a tech disaster. My hard drive died, and in a series of miscalculations including reliance on tech friends, rather than professionals… no, that’s not quite right. He IS a pro, he’s just the friend of one of my kids and I did not make it very high up his priority list. I understand that. He put his business first–like I should have, eh?

It took weeks to even get him to check it out.

And in the weeks that stretched into months while I was waiting for everything to be repaired, I kind of let things slide, getting more and more stressed all the time, which is not conducive to being creative.

And given the tech pro did not want to impart bad news to me, I thought the disk was recoverable. Miscommunications all round.

It was not recoverable.

By the time *I* worked that out, [can you imagine how stressed I was by this time?] I just gave up on the pro and purchased a new solid state hard drive large enough to handle those enormous Scrivener files. [Scrivener I love you but jeez those files can be huge.] Kid extra installed it for me. [We went solid state because Australia is only going to be getting hotter and heat isn’t good for tech.]

And I happily went to plug in my external hard drive to copy all my data across… and nope.

My external hard drive was dead; unrecoverably dead, wouldn’t even turn on kind of dead. What are the odds? I mean, I know I have an issue with tech, but … really? [Seagate, I do NOT like you.]

Sighs heavily.

I had made a backup onto one of the kids’ external hard drive, so I didn’t lose everything. If I had lost the last 25 years of digital photos, I may have burnt something down.

I’ve just lost the last two years. Finance records, databases of dvds, music and books, words written, books purchased, email addresses, contact details for friends, permission from people to use their images for book covers, etc. All gone.

I sobbed.

So far as my writing goes, sure, there are docs in Google, scrivener backups to zip files, and docs in Evernote and more stuff here there and everywhere. The cloud is pretty good when something like this happens.

Half the issue is the sheer amount of hours it takes to work out what is even missing. I am seriously going to have to go through my Goodreads list to work out what books I have lost. I get a lot of copies through ARC teams, or promotions, or direct from authors. I am trying to message people in Kickstarter to get new download links to things I purchased.

It takes longer to start fixing it all when my inner critical voice is telling me what an idiot I am.

So here I am.

I am an idiot. That’s done; we’ve got that out of the way.

I can hear J Thorn saying ‘if your backups are not in THREE different places, your data does not exist.’ I read Joanna Penn’s daily back up regime and thought ‘that’s a bit over the top’. She lists it in her latest title: Productivity for Authors. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48561019-productivity-for-authors]

I write in Scrivener but every single day I write, I compile a MSWord document of my work in progress (WIP). I save it with a date and time stamp and keep all the iterations, so I end up with a Draft folder with 50+ documents in.

This is called version control. If you haven’t worked in the corporate or tech world, you might not know about version control, but basically, even if I lose one of these versions, I’ve got so many others over time that I will never lose everything. I don’t go back and look at those older drafts but if something happens, I won’t lose the whole project. I also email the file to myself every day on Gmail so I always have another backup and I save the Draft to a Dropbox folder in the cloud which syncs between workstations. Even if my MacBook Pro gets stolen or blows up, everything is in Dropbox.

I do this for every writing session, whether it’s first draft or editing. Every time I touch the manuscript, I compile it, save it to Dropbox, and email it to myself. Sometimes that is two or three times a day during my intensive writing phases.

I also keep backups on physical external hard drives and save some important files to Amazon S3 cloud hosting, so I back up pretty much everything multiple times to build in redundancy. I worked in the tech industry for 13 years, so I know these things are necessary and saving too much is better than losing it all.

from: Penn, Joanna. Productivity For Authors: Find Time to Write, Organize your Author Life, and Decide what Really Matters (Books for Writers Book 10) (pp. 69-70). Curl Up Press. Kindle Edition.

No, no, it isn’t over the top. It seems like there might be less sobbing with this method.

I’m off to buy the largest USB stick I can afford, and maybe a new external hard drive.

This week we had an electricity blackout.%% A big one. I was at the mall when alarms started going off; most people ignored them. The local mall has a water leakage issue that constantly sets off the fire alarms and we’ve all heard it before. They should just make a fire engine parking space at the back entrance, but this time seemed different. The supermarket was on quarter lighting, alarms were going off out the back, and the staff rushed about shutting all the fridges and putting away all the deli goods.

This was serious. An announcement said there would be further information but I grabbed my purchases and walked home.

At home, the power shut off as I came in the door.

Then it remained off.

The entire region was out. An estimated 26,000 homes, the traffic lights, the railway station, the local hospital… everything. All we could hear in our front street was ambulance sirens. Later, a friend in the police force said they had all available ambulances ferrying patients to other hospitals.

We have a gas stove, so with the aid of a good old box of matches we could heat water and cook.

But the internet was also affected; all the nodes were down and our phones were useless.

The cause was a fire in a substation basement and the problem was that such fires release toxic chemicals so no one could go in there until it cleared. Plus, no power for fans to clear the mess and no windows to open. It seems like an obvious design fault, but still…

At about 5:30pm we got power back. Kid 3 got a craving for a halal snack pack so we headed off to walk to the local. Amazingly, it was open but it only takes cash and we had none. Trust the ex-refugees to have a cash economy and a generator. All the first responders know this and eat there.

Everything else was dead; the pub, the petrol station, all the ATM machines. A highway patrol officer was directing traffic and had probably been doing it for hours. On our walk, we noticed that none of our neighbours had lights on. Just us and our street. We are close to the hospital and have formed a theory that we are inside its service loop. [at my exercise class everyone else got the power back at 6:30 am the next day]

‘This is how the apocalypse starts’, I said to Kid 3. ‘First the internet goes, then the power, and no-one has any cash. We’ll be reduced to a barter economy.’ We went home and cooked burgers.

I cannot imagine how much food had to be thrown away by the supermarkets.

The electricity supplier is begging people not to turn on high energy using appliances, but of course, it’s on their webpage and nobody can read it. People with power won’t bother and people without can’t. It’s almost like they don’t understand their own business.

%% this was written on 15th February but when the power DID come back on it fried all the internet nodes. We had no internet for six days, no TV, no games, and no ability to post the blogpost I had written and then forgotten about. Honestly, my house nearly went feral. I had to go to the library to keep up my 4theWords streak.

So swings and roundabouts I guess. We got power early but lost the Internet.

Early in 2018 I bought a complete DVD boxset of Agatha Christie’s Poirot with David Suchet.

It’s a beast. There are multiple disks on each spike.

See that? 5050 minutes… almost 85 hours.

And it has taken me a little while to watch them all. It revelatory to see how the production values changed over the series; and as always it’s a game of ‘spot the awesome English actor’.

It is singularly amazing that all the main character actors stuck it out for the entire series. It would not be the same if it wasn’t the right Hastings or Chief Inspector Japp or Miss Lemon in the last episodes. Expertly played by Hugh Fraser, Philip Jackson and Pauline Moran respectively.

But more and more I see just how clever Christie was. They are amazing stories. An absolute master class in mystery writing.

It’s as if she challenged herself. I’ll make the murderer the narrator. I’ll make the murderer one of the victims. I’ll make the murderer the doctor. I’ll make the murderer all the suspects. I’ll make the murderer the investigating police officer. And so on. I’m reading ‘Talking About Detective Fiction’ by P.D. James and she laughed that all you had to do with a Christie story was pick the person most unlikely to be the murderer and you had a good chance to get it right.

Some Christie expert will no doubt swear she repeated herself, but I’m struggling to think of an example.

They focus more on the story than the method. And the thing Christie was so good at was writing these utterly appalling but somehow so English families. Decades of building anger, resentment and guilt. Adult married children still living with their parents or step-parents and waiting patiently (or not) for the old tyrant to die and leave them the estate.

Personally, I want to be Ariadne Oliver, the self insert Christie character who hates her own fictional detective. ‘Why did I make him Norwegian?’ she moans in the same way I expect Christie did about making Poirot from Belgium.