Got down to #author stuff, now that I'm retired and can devote time to the #business of #writing #fiction. First order of business: catalog the unsold novels from after the burn out that need revision and rewrites.

Turns out that disconnecting my Mac from my work VPN messed up my folders. I had somehow mapped (don't know the Mac term) my work Windows computer folders to the Mac, and when I look in documents it tries to find it on the network and fails. If I reboot, so long as I go directly from my user's directory to documents directory, I'm good. If I click on Documents in Finder, it redirects and I'm screwed.

First thing I did was copy all my writing folders to the desktop. At least I've lost none of my old novels and short work.

I thought there were 7 completed books, and I said so online. There are actually 9, three that form a trilogy and one novel with a sequel in the mix. There are two incomplete novels.

Some works are older than others. Pages refuses to open one novel from 1996, a fun space opera that possibly has the highest chance of early sales. I haven't tried the others. Now I gotta install Word, of which I am not a fan, and investigate programs that'll open the really old files. If anyone wants to chime in with suggestions, please do! (I can always find someone with a Windows machine if need be.) Putting Google on TODO. I actually have original copies of chapters from my Apple ][ days, but thankfully I updated those to the Mac and to a new millennium version of Word in what were my PowerPC days.

Incidentally, there really are three novellas in good shape.What surprises me though? There looks like about 15 short stories, many complete because I see multiple submissions in the various folders. I completely forgot about these, and was sure I never wrote short-form.

Baby steps, I guess.

#writingLife #writingCommunity #writersOfMastodon

@sfwrtr You might find that Libreoffice is actually better at reading old Word files than Word.

@stevendbrewer

"You might find that Libreoffice is actually better at reading old Word files than Word."

Yep. Word can't read files prior to 1994.I finally got my links to my writing ironed out and content backed up into the cloud (what a pain), though it is in Time Machine, so I installed the newest Mac version of #LibreOffice.

I opened a 1992 file. Check.
I opened a 1989 file. Well, all the lowercase "a"s are converted to circumflex characters, but I can work with that.

I figured out (finally) how to search for dates on my Mac and found a story treatment named "The Revenger" (no extension, Mac naturally!). The date is Mar 25, 1986.

It opened with a few box characters, but otherwise readable. It looks like my attempt at an Andre Norton type SF space opera. It even opened "Tree Castle", which is or probably was a Mac Draw document. It was dated Jan 1, 1986. It's my oldest document. I've a screen cap below of the mentioned documents open in LibreOffice.

Yeah, for document conversion, LibreOffice rocks. The content of some of these old documents is amateurish; weird since I was already published.

Still... No lost IP. This is a good thing.

cc: @taur10 @alan

#writing #writer #author #writersofmastodon #writingcommunity #fiction #writinglife #fiction #sf #ScienceFiction #spaceopera