Flashbacks

First of all, thank you to all those who offered suggestions as to how I might retrieve the chapters of The Lovers that I accidentally overwrote last month. Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending upon how one looks at it - I only managed to retrieve two. Curiously, this was something of an anticlimax, as I'd already begun to rewrite the lost material, and part of me didn't want the older stuff back. It was gone, and I had resigned myself to it. It was a bit like keeping a bedside vigil on a terminally ill relative, and then finding that they hadn't died after all but insisted on clinging on to life, even after everyone else had progressed from worrying about them, to grieving for them, and, finally, to getting on with life.

In the process of attempting to retrieve the lost files, the programme that I used was obliged to dig up all sorts of stuff that I thought was long gone. As none of the files had a name, I had to open each one and examine the contents in order to discover if it contained the material that I was looking for. I found sections of old books, early drafts containing characters whose names subsequently changed, or who ultimately simply disappeared from the finished narrative. There were chapters-in-progress, false starts, even part of a chapter from a children's book that I started once and then never quite got around to finishing. Oddly, there were few deletions, a consequence of the way that I write, where each draft builds on the next in a slow accretion of detail. Still, it was, in a strange way, a kind of alternate history of the last ten years, a junkpile of might-have-beens.

I've spent a lot of the last two weeks dealing with the past of the novels, now that I think of it. File retrieval apart, I put together a 5,000 word piece on the origins of Parker and the novels, which may be published by Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Bookstore in New York as part of an ongoing series. It was appropriate to do it now, I think, as the publication of the tenth book approaches. Ten books. Ten years of being published. I'll be 40 next month. Lots of anniversaries with a zero at the end of them.

So, with that in mind, thanks to all of you who have supported my work over the past decade. I'm very grateful.

By the way, did I mention that I met Kevin Costner last week? Well, I did.
But that's another story . . .

This week John read

Wolf of the Plains by Conn Iggulden
The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God by Joe Eszterhaus
AIiens by Bryan Appleyard

and listened to

Oracular Spectacular by MGMT
It's a Shame About Ray (Collector's Edition) by The Lemonheads
Rosemarie by Thistletown

HELL

While computers have done a great deal to make a writer's life easier, there is one way in which words on a screen can never improve on paper. Barring a fire, or a careless spring clean of a room, words on paper can't be easily lost. But words on a screen are only one mouse click away from oblivion.

Yesterday, I began transferring, from laptop to desktop, the work on The Lovers that I had done in the US. The delay in the transfer was due to travel, and the completion of my office, in which I am, or was, happily established. I had about 25,000 words from the US, and before I left I'd managed to get about 30,000 done on my desktop. Due to the vagaries of builders, painters, and assorted other distractions, I'd failed to back them up.

I know, I know. My fault, right? I always back up what I write, but moving house tends to result in routines falling by the wayside. I've been struggling to find my feet, let alone a place to work, in the new house. I think I was just glad to be getting any work at all done while strange men were trooping through equally strange rooms.

So yesterday, in my nice little office space, I transferred one file marked 'The Lovers' to my desktop and, when asked if I wanted to replace the older file with the same title, I immediately clicked 'OK'.

Bang. 30,000 words gone. The prologue, the first five chapters, all gone. As I write this, I'm sitting in a state of near shock. That's three months of hard grind down the drain, and I've undone all that I managed to achieve in the US. A frantic call to the nice, clever computer man who services my Mac gave no joy: I'd overwritten the files, not deleted them. They're gone, and they're not coming back.

This is the first time that I've ever lost so much work. It's beyond frustrating. I was on target to complete the book in October, allowing for time spent touring The Reapers, and now I'm not. I'm not sure that I can even remember what I wrote: I can recall characters and situations, but not the dialogue. The prologue was good, I felt, and a long encounter between a girl and the parents of her murdered boyfriend was moving and more than a little eerie, but trying to reproduce it exactly will be like trying to snatch at smoke. Right now, I want to bang my head against the wall. It's my own stupidity that's caused this to happen.

So what to do? Start again, that's what. Open a new file, entitle it 'Prologue', and begin writing.

And yet that's so much easier said than done.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn . . .