Tag Archives: cloud

Yes I know I am a bit behind of the times, but I still can’t help but be excited about my discovery of the existence of a back-up system called Cloud.

For days now I have been moving my files into the cloud and have used more than a third of the free space it offers and I am still not finished – at least not all of the things on my computer are just stories, there are family pictures and videos too!  Things that would have been lost if my computer just suddenly broke down – so far there is 5gb of photos and videos and a further 1gb of my writing!

A lot of my writing had been stored for years and years – no actually… decades on floppy disks and those little USB gadget things.

You have no idea how ecstatic I am to have this!

Because, I am getting stuff from old computers too!  Soon – Paul has found a man who can save all those old files from my dead computers to then move onto my cloud… I have no idea how that’s going to work, but Paul is sure the man thinks it to be easy!

Not only that but a lot of my hand written notes have got damaged over the years due to people not being careful with my stuff!  I am careful with my stuff, but the klutzes I live with regularly bump into my piles of boxes and knock them over and sometimes just leave them there on the floor dripping their drinks onto the papers below!

I wouldn’t mind so much but I have a disability where bending down to pick things up is difficult because of pain and swelling I have in the spleen and don’t mention the permanent dizzy spells I get since I had my mastoid removed when I was seventeen!

So naturally, I feel inclined to try and type out my handwritten notes an hour a day until they are saved on the cloud too… but I am running out of space and I am nowhere near finished saving stuff.

I write a lot – Paul thinks I have inherited something from whatever created Barbara Cartland as she is (according to my grandmother) a fifth or sixth cousin!  What is so funny about that is I too have an obsession with a colour – the colour purple, though with black and white zebra patterns and polka dots and cerise injected there too, I am not as obsessed as she was!

The thing is the – finishing… I can never decide on which end I like best for a story!

A lot of my work I am finding from floppy disks literally dates back to 1997 and the following years!

It has been a revelation of how my work has developed and personally I would say that my oldest work is better than my newer ones.

It seems that education has ruined me.

What a lot of people do not understand is that for me, I am never NOT writing and I am never NOT thinking about what I will write next!  I am completely absorbed in my make believe worlds.

I have had too many people tell me it’s not healthy!

But I can’t help it, because it heals me mentally.  I have had a lot of unusual, aggressive events happen to me on such a regular basis I have been told by a normal psychiatrist that they cannot help me, because I have experienced such similar traumas as those who have served time at war.  Basically I need a military psychiatrist, but being a civilian who has never been in the military they are not available to me.

I also found out since moving these files into cloud, that my estimate of seventy nine stories on the go is wrong, it far exceeds that number and I haven’t finished discovering more!

When I say I am going to seriously write from now onwards, it isn’t that I haven’t been writing for a while, it means that I intend to focus on one particular project until it has finished! 

Finishing is a huge problem for me, because I am frightened of it.  I am scared because it is like I have killed every character in the book by finishing the story… or at least made them feel neglected by me as their god!

It’s a weird thing, you probably wouldn’t understand…

I am afraid of it because it also means that I may want to write the story again with a different ending or different scenes, but keeping the same characters and I am frightened of boring potential readers with semi rehashes.

I came to a conclusion last month that perhaps my stories should be considered as part of a vast multiverse sort of thing; that it is perhaps OK to mention the same characters in various stories and they don’t necessarily have to be the main protagonist all the while… I mean, it works for major comics and other writers… but then I struggle with the concept of whether or not I am that clever enough to do this?

Then I sit back and remind myself that I do this with my vampire series, what is so different about doing the same thing with my general fantasy or horror books too?

Then I argue with myself about how those books are meant to be standalones or a particular series that is poles apart from the other works… and then I get nowhere again!

So I totter on, typing my stories, rehashing things and saving things and worrying about whether or not I have wasted people’s time with the notion of ever getting anything finished?

It makes things worse when someone close to me tells me; yes you might have actually…

Gee thanks!

I am going through the process of letting go…

Trying to learn how to be happy with the end!

But the idea of an “end” terrifies me!

So there we have it… an author who is terrified of dedicating an end to her work!

So how do we handle that?

We choose to make our endings open ended but satisfying, that’s what we will do!  But which bits should make the end?  It’s a hard decision but my son Henry suggested that I should put my ideas down on a big wheel and let the wheel decide for me, so that’s what I am doing!

If it works, who is to judge?

So, yes, my work is going to end based on the big wheel of decisions from a website called wheelofnames.com it’s also good for helping me decide who dies next in my  stories!

Anyway… exciting stuff is the cloud… I hope younger writers appreciate how much easier their lives are today for storing their work than it was when I was younger… Cor blimey I sound ancient, I am only turning forty in October! 

Thanks for reading!