... well, still old. It just feels new because it is interesting.
My family takes a few weeks of summer vacation every year. We've been doing it for over a decade now and it works for us. Some years we go to Disney World, some years we go on a cruise, most years we visit family ... but we take a few weeks. That's changed recently as my older kids have started graduating from high school and college ... but the younger ones and my wife still vacation.
I always take a laptop with me. Either a work laptop (some of my 'vacations' have been working vacations where I work some of my time in order to let my family have more vacation time) or a personal laptop - but I always take one. [Side Note: This was before I became paranoid about my job spying on what I was doing with their laptop while not at work.]
I use the laptop to play on the internet, maybe play some games ... and write. Typically, I take along a USB drive and keep what I write on the USB drive - especially when using a work laptop (which I don't do anymore) for personal stuff.
In 2006, I had the idea for a story while on vacation. It was a slightly different take on a djinn story and I was really enamored of it at the time. Over the summer of 2006 and the summer of 2007, I wrote about 250 pages (in Microsoft Word saved as both .docx and .txt files) in 6 chapters (the chapters were LOOOONG).
In late 2007, I got a new computer, new laptop - I upgraded everything. In the upheaval, I LOST the story. Completely. I lost the USB drive, I lost what was on the hard drive - I even somehow lost the copy I'd stored up in (what is now considered) the cloud. It vanished from the face of the earth.
Over the past 13 years, I've tried to re-create the story a number of times - more times than I can count, actually. I never could. The magic was gone. Either I couldn't get the story right or I couldn't find the right voice or I was trying to force things or I was too tired to try to re-create 250 pages of text. It was gone forever and while I lamented its loss, I'd come to accept it.
I'm a bit of a pack rat, especially when it comes to books and computers. When I re-built my PC, I decided to do something I've not done since our last move - clean out all of the junk. I felt the clutter around me was blocking me from actually doing work (both writing and my job). I pulled everything out of my closet - a closet which holds my Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore Amiga 1000, Amiga 2000 and one of my Amiga 500s (all of which still work, mind you, or at least did when I last pulled them out and set them up), books, magazines, wires, computer components, some old XBox stuff, and ... well ... junk.
Inside the closet were some old laptop bags which were ripped or otherwise useless but which I'd kept because ... hoarder. I tossed them in the garbage pile (which was obscenely large) and, when I'd de-junk-ified (it's a technical term, look it up) the closet, I started shoveling the garbage into plastic bags to toss.
Luckily, as I started to toss the laptop bags into the garbage bag - I decided, for some unknown, perverse reason to make sure they were empty. I found a laptop security cable I'd been searching for for years, a handheld device I used to use to give Powerpoint presentations (it has a usb dongle which attaches to a laptop and allows the handheld unit to advance slides and generally act as a mouse with a neat little laser pointer attachment), a prized calculator I'd thought I'd thrown away ages ago (but was still good with new batteries so I gave it to my son), a stupid toy we called the 'magic button' which my pre-adolescent children and I used to play with and hide from each other which only I seem to actually remember anymore ... and a usb drive.
A few days later, after I finished cleaning, I decided to see what was on the USB drive. Many files were corrupted - or, at least couldn't be opened with current software - but there, in a nice folder titled 'Wishes' was my djinn story.
I've spent the last week re-reading it when I had time after work. I've spent much of the time editing it (I can't believe I used to use the word 'that' so much - no wonder it's now a pet peeve of mine!). It's unfinished - but it's there. Along with some rudimentary notes I took about what was happening, where I was taking the story and so on.
I won't post it - not yet. However, it has now joined 'Runesward', 'Fairly CAPable' and 'Ring of Command' on my list of stories I am going to finish and post in the next two years.
Oh...and I kept one of the old laptop bags because the only reason I junked it was the new laptop was bulkier than the last and didn't fit but my current laptop does and because ... well ... hoarder. Still.
Thanks for reading,
Kenn Ghannon