Douglas Fox: Blog

Thank you to everyone who has written me about this story. I am not able to answer all of you, but thank you just the same.

I have turned on voting for the story. I hope everyone is enjoying it. I discovered I made an error when I numbered the chapters. The complete Book 1 is eighteen chapters long, not nineteen as I previously stated.

Work continues on Book 2. Thankfully I am more diligent about backing up my work than last spring. My primary laptop died this morning. I have never seen text on a computer screen shimmy before. Then I had bursts of black rectangles all over the screen followed by a locked up computer. A hard reboot produced nothing but a black screen. I think that laptop is history. Thankfully all my files are located on a USB SSD drive, so I am able to pull the SSD drive from the dead laptop and plug it into my backup laptop and continue working.

I look forward to hearing from you as I continue to post Coming Home, Book 1.

Doug Fox

The first chapter of Coming Home, my newest story, has been submitted for posting. It should be up later this evening.

I will post chapters Tuesday and Friday evenings until all nineteen chapters are posted. I will turn on voting in when I post Chapter 5, in a couple weeks.

This is the first Book of a two or three book series. Book 2 is about 75% done. I hope to post it in 2022.

I hope you enjoy my story.

Doug Fox

I want to thank everyone who offered to help with editing my next story. I especially want to thank the two who are actively working on the editing with me. We are about two-thirds through Book 1 of Coming Home. I expect I will be ready to start posting soon. Currently I am planning to post Chapter 1 on Tuesday, August 10th. I will post new chapters on Tuesdays and Saturdays until I get the sixteen chapters posted, sometime in October.

Coming Home follows Kyle and Penny Martin and their kids, David, Jessie, Danny and Robbie when the move back to their Landenberg, PA home when Kyle accepts the head coaching job in Philadelphia.

Book 2 of Coming Home will follow. I hope to have it ready in about six months. It is around three-quarters written right now.

Douglas Fox

I still have hopes of beginning to post Book 1 of Coming Home this summer. The editor I have been using for this story has gotten super busy. He managed to go through two chapters in the last two months. At that rate, I won't be posting until 2023. That will not do!

If any readers, hopefully with experience at writing or editing, are willing to assist, I am willing to give you a try. Send me an email detailing what experience you may have, if any. I will send you a chapter or two, or another of my completed short stories to try and see if this will work out.

My second step back was a stupid thing I did a few weeks ago. I was cleaning up my story directory and wanted to delete an old file I no longer needed. I did not notice that the focus in Windows Explorer was set on the directory pane rather than the files pane when I hit Delete. Of course miserable MS Windows did exactly what I asked and began deleting everything in my stories directory. I hit cancel as fast as I could once I realized what happened. By the time I stopped it, Windows was merrily deleting files in the Coming Home subdirectory. The main Coming Home Word doc disappeared.

I wasn't too worried. I could retrieve the deleted files from the #Recycle directory on my Raid 5 network storage device… except it turns out the network storage device only creates the #Recycle directory if you explicitly go into the operating system and turn that feature on. Sigh.

I got lazy during the pandemic. Normally I keep my working files on a portable SSD drive that I can use with any computer wherever I am. I would back the files on the SSD drive to my network storage device every few days. I have been working from home for the last fifteen months, so I did not worry about backing up the way I should. I have been working with computers for over forty years. I should know better.

The bottom line is I lost three scenes in Coming Home Book 1. Thankfully one of the scenes was in what I sent out to my editor and I managed to save his files before they were deleted. That scene was restored in a few minutes. The second scene was relatively short and I recreated it in an evening. I wrote the final scene in Book 1 about six weeks ago, so it wasn't too hard to recreate it.

Book 2 took a bigger hit. I have managed to recreate the missing scenes from Book 2 over the past three weeks, so I am back where I was when disaster struck. I think a couple of the recreated scenes are actually better than the missing first draft. Now, all I need is some editing help to get the story ready for posting.

The sad thing about all of this is not what happened to Coming Home. I lost two-thirds of a story called "Forbidden Rose" and all of another short story. Forbidden Rose tells the story of Rose Henry, Will's oldest, and her first time with a boy. Sadly, I had just finished both stories and had done a first read through beginning to end for each. I threw together 2-3 pages of notes immediately of as much as I could remember of the stories. Some day I will get them rewritten.

I have probably rambled on enough. The bottom line is Coming Home is ready and waiting for editing help. If you have experience and some free time, I could use a hand. Drop me an email and I will see if we can work together.

Doug Fox

My next story, "Coming Home" continues to grow as I write it. I decided to post the story in more than one part, so I can get some of it out sooner rather than waiting until I have the whole story complete. This is similar to what Al Steiner is doing with Intemperance.

Editing on Part 1 has started. I also updated the "Lost and Found" epilogue to match up with some minor changes I have made in the timeline for Life in Paradise. Don't get too excited to check out the updated Epilogue when it is posted later tonight. You would need a fine toothed comb to find what has changed.

[If you must know, I changed the length of Chip Brinton's career a little and corrected the name of Jeff Lurie's son. I finally found out his name is Julian not Matt. Matt was just a wild guess I made ten years ago when I was writing "Lost and Found."]

I would appreciate some feedback from all of you. I dislike the "Washington Football Team" nickname the ex-Redskins are currently using. As a placeholder in "Coming Home," I am calling the team the "Redtails." This is one of a couple dozen possible nicknames I have seen. I hope the WFT comes up with a permanent name before I begin posting. Since my story is set in a fictional world, though similar to but not identical to real life, would it bother anyone if I kept the Redtails nickname when I post the story rather than using the awkward "Washington Football Team" nickname if Washington has no permanent nickname?

Hopefully, Part 1 of "Coming Home" will be ready for posting sometime this summer.

Meanwhile, I will continue writing.

Doug Fox