Halloween Scares
The scariest thing that has ever happened to me on Halloween: I wasn’t even planning on pulling out my laptop and writing, but I did—at this point, it’s out of habit; if I don’t want to write, I have to force myself not to. I did something slightly different than usual the night prior: reorganized my workspace and unplugged my USB thumb drive while my laptop was still turned on but not open. This is something I’ve done before with no issues. However, I went to turn on my laptop and plug in my thumb drive on the morning of Halloween, and it told me that my thumb drive needed to be repaired.
Immediate freak out. I had backed up my files onto another hard drive, but I hadn’t done it in months. I was trying to make it a weekly habit, but I frequently forgot because I never wrote it down or put it into my schedule.
Before hitting repair, my thumb drive opened to show me all of the files, and I immediately backed up all of my files onto another drive—of which I noticed that my previous files weren’t even backed up there like I thought. Then, I began the repair job. Thankfully, my hard drive didn’t request to be reformatted and it did not reformat itself during the process. Everything is good, crisis averted, but I was absolutely prepared to cry for most of the day and attempt to remember everything that might have been deleted.
Every author has been through the “I accidentally deleted/removed/moved this file” and we believe it all to be lost forever. Some authors get very lucky, like myself, and the files have simply been moved or the drive just needs to be repaired. Other authors are not so lucky. I actually had an author friend who lost a document with a story on it and the entire story was never to be seen again. She has actually said that the story was originally going to be very different than it turned out, but she forgot what she had written down. She says it’s a totally different story than it was going to be—a fae fantasy, so anything could have happened.
Reading Recommendations
I have nothing new to offer for recommendations right now, unless you like nonfiction. In which case, I recommend South by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Honestly, I have not read it yet, but I ordered it from amazing this week.
My Current Read
Losing Lola by Jim Flynn Six. Mister B Gone by Clive Barker. These are outside of my usual genre of reads. Clive Barker not so much, but he certainly isn’t romance. But Losing Lola is a Ponzi scheme Wall Street murder thriller book. I don’t really know what else to call it yet, but that’s the vibe it’s giving me.
I’m currently not reading any romance books, however, I did purchase two romance books this past week, which I will be getting to once I finish these two books.
Yeah, I bought six books this week… to give you some perspective, I have only bought twelve books this whole year so far. I bought the same number of books this week as I have over the last ten months. Crazy.
Recent Finds Unrelated to Reading
I have discovered soap making! I won’t go into much detail about what I’ll be using this for, as it relates to a book bundle that I will be putting out in the future. But this is something I’m so excited about that I’ve already started buying products.
Also wax stamp seals are my new favorite way to wrap books for book bundles. I’ve got a couple pretty unique wax stamps that I will be using for future book bundles.
Recent Movies & TV Shows
My regular TV shows haven’t been on this week due to the World Series, but I did start watching S.WA.T. on Peacock. It’s a show similar to SVU that I’ve decided to give a chance to. I enjoy it so far, but I’ve been loving Law & Order: SVU a whole lot recently. They’ve got some seriously deep and hard-hitting episodes. Two of them just recently made me cry at the end: Smoked (season 12, episode 24) and Spiraling Down (season 13, episode 10).