John Boy Walton lost his manuscript the old fashioned way. It burned with the rest of the house.
My manuscript loss happened the modern way with electronic mishaps.
The same type of tablet John Boy used to write his stories, although John Boy’s tablet didn’t have a bar code.
It has been years, if not decades, since I wrote anything down on paper with pen in hand.
John Boy, now in college, acts like the big man on campus by smoking a pipe.
He brings his sophomoric behavior home with him, which results in dire consequences for the whole family.
The Waltons’ home engulfed in flames.
The entire family escapes safely with their lives, but they are traumatized beyond measure.
Will they ever recover?
John Boy risking his life trying to save his manuscripts.
Plenty of drama surrounds John Boy, more than the usual, when he tries to save his stories.
His death-defying efforts ended up in vain.
John Boy’s room is set ablaze with fire, and his stories are burning.
John Boy’s writing is gone.
His stories are lost.
When I started to write, especially when writing “the big one,” I had the fear that I too would lose, like John Boy Walton, my manuscript.
I was having problems at home with my server and internet.
Documents were stuck in the web, up on the cloud or someplace else that I didn’t even know, and I didn’t want to lose them.
I thought the best thing was to save everything on an external drive.
Little did I know, you can’t bump an external drive too much, or it will break.
Inside is literally a CD Rom spinning around, writing and rewriting on the disk.
If it is bumped too much, the arm or other movable parts of the device will break, making the drive useless.
I had no idea there were moving parts that could break.
My greatest fear came true.
I lost my manuscript, and unlike John Boy Walton, I wasn’t smoking a pipe.
I took the drive to the Geek Squad, and they told me it would cost $500 to $2,000 to recover my manuscript with no guarantee it would work.
That was my only option, and it was unacceptable.
Fortunately for me, I was working with an editor, and I emailed her portions of my manuscript, 20 pages at a time.
From all those emails, I was able to reconstruct my 397-page manuscript over several days of frantic work.
Now, I have “the big one” saved on a solid-state external drive with no moving parts.
I also emailed myself a copy, all in one piece and not in 20-page fragments, just in case.
That reminds me, I have made a few changes in my manuscript, and although it is saved on the external drive, I better email myself another copy just in case the dog ends up eating my new solid-state drive with no moving parts.
Rocky ate my homework many times when I was in middle school.
The Waltons s4-ep18 – The Burnout (allaboutthewaltons.com)
“The Waltons” The Burnout (TV Episode 1976) – Full Cast & Crew – IMDb
The Burn Out | The Waltons Wiki | Fandom
The Waltons Episode Guide Season 4 (the-waltons.com)
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