back up your data.
this was my wife’s MP3 player/USB drive, affectionately referred to as the ‘doodad’, which i’ve been using for bringing files back and forth to school, including No Good Deed.
thankfully, i didn’t lose any book work, but I did lose school work and several other things that will be difficult to fully reproduce. even worse, i’d been telling myself for a week that i should back them up, but nooooooo, i just had to keep putting it off.
i’ve since backed up all my documents onto a separate hard drive, which i haven’t done in a long time. far too long. the thought of losing my book like that is physically unsettling.
so, if you haven’t backed up your work lately, don’t be a bill. do it, today.
in book news, i’m about halfway through the book correcting the asterisks. in addition to the larger notes i tacked on to the end of the document as i typed, i put a *next to any smaller, one-shot items that i wasn’t certain about (did i say this street was Campbell or Prescott?; would this sentence sound better with the verb in front, or afterward; do i even need this paragraph or is it overkill?; are Swiss bank accounts still the best for hiding large amounts of money? [answer:no, panama's the place to really hide your gobs of cash]).
it’s been good work, so far, but not as quick as i’d hoped, because, since i’m just putting asterisks, i need to spend a little time with each new instance to figure out why i put one there in the first place. this slows it down a litte, and sometime the research slows me further (re: panama), but it’s good stuff, and necessary. i even stumbled upon another, unrelated, story idea, but first things first.