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Hi everyone!
Today I'm asking for help. I have, you guessed a corrupted file. I use an old version of MS works, (Ie Cheap) for my word processing. Yesterday, It decided to digest about 5 to 10K of words of my newest story. To make matters worse both my working file and my backup save file was hit. The file refuses to open and I get that dismal message that the file is in use by another program or is corrupted.
After much use of colorful metaphors, I found I could open the file with note and wordpad but it is unreadable. I tried also opening the file in HMTL but no joy there either. Changing the fonts in wordpad also made no difference.
So is there any words of wisdom out there?
It could have been worse. I keep a third copy on a removable usb drive and that copy is fine. I am at the end of a 123k word novel and could have lost the whole thing but for my paranoia.
Still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I'm going to have to rewrite that entire chapter plus if this last gambit at wrestling my words back from this infernal device fails, so please help if you can!
Hugs!
grover
Comments
re: corrupted file
Hi Grover,
does this help:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/200334
FWIW
The procedure in the above link worked for me some time back when I was still using MSWorks WPS. Sadly, it won't work on some other archaic file types. :-(
KJT
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Thanks
That let me access some of my Doc. Still can't copy/paste but hey this is better than nothing. At least I can see what I wrote. When writing I'm not really aware just what I've just wrote sometimes. This helps! Thank you! Thank you a lot!
Big Grateful Hugs!
grover
Well I've never claimed what I write is literature. Judging from the two lists of must reads I've never read much of either one, so in all honesty I don't think care much for Literature. Give me an interesting story be it a comic book or two bit hack Sci-Fantasy paperback and I'm happy. Like they say I'm no expert but I know what I like! 'Nuff said!
Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut
Your muse must have a cruel sense of humor. I hate that feeling of "knowing" you won't remember all the really neat things you put into the story if you can't find that file. It sucks. However. . .your writing will probably be much better if you simply forget the corrupt file and write the document again.
The process of "killing our darlings" is streamlined when we go back a second time to a blank piece of paper. You will write what is essential and the rest will remain in your subconscious -- where it should -- as background.
I'm not making a judgment about your writing, but overall what I read on BC is verbose. Stephen King rarely describes his villains, leaving that up to the minds of his readers. If he does tell us how they appear, he doesn't tell us their exact height in inches and feet and weight right down to the actual pounds. I wish BC writers would somemtimes say "so short he could easily walk without ducking under the outstretched arms of his classmates" or "he was so thin he looked like a Christmas card from your favorite aunt that cheerfully noted a contribution to charity -- rather than a gift to you."
I'm sorry for your plight, but maybe this is more of an opportunity than a tragedy.
The world hasn't been horribly fair to Cheeseland this year. It's not easy cutting the jockstrap with Favre and watching the Brewers meltdown. The Badgers couldn't even provide their normal heroics. Nonetheless, I hope you have a Merry Christmas and find a way to understand that Aaron Rodgers is a very good quarterback.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
"Hack" Writers?
Sure, Stephen King is popular, and they make reasonably successful movies out of his stuff, but weren't you saying the other day that just because somebody is a best-selling author doesn't mean they aren't a hack? Were I to come across a table where somebody was giving away signed First Edition Stephen King novels for free, I would step around them and continue on.
I agree that sometimes we are too verbose, but the descriptions you decry are what many of us look for. These are niche market stories and as such we/I want the details that appeal to my interests. Were the writer to wax poetic about the hero's car, lovingly detailing the type of trim, headers and carburetor, I'd skip on past. This is not an auto enthusiast's site. But describe (well, mind you) the trim on the dress, the shoes, and the hairstyle our heroine has, and I'm a happy reader. I've read some of the minimalist stories you seem to prefer, and when I get to the end of the story and find I don't even know the heroine's hair color and length, I'm disappointed.
I have even less interest in sports than I have in autos. While I know who Farve is, I thought Aaron Rodgers was a sports reporter for a TV station I used to do parttime at. Your meat is my fat, and vice versa.
KJT
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Put Away Your Claws, Karen, We Agree
Many people think King is a hack. I can see where they get that opinion. Some of his short stories are quite good. Many of his novels are unreadable.
Your point is well-taken about the description of the clothing. Cross-dressing stories normally MUST include fairly detailed descriptions of the clothing because it is expected in that genre, but not every cross-dresser is into the same kind of clothing. Dimelza, for example, rarely spoke to the lingerie. I think perfume is an integral part of cross-dressing, so I spend a great deal of time in almost every story describing the scent.
I'm not so sure stories about transsexuals are so dependent on the clothing. I had a very tough time with that issue when I wrote "My Cherie Amour" anut the intersexed individual. You might recall the maid uniforms. If I went too far I would improperly signal a fetish. If I didn't go far enough with the description I ran the risk of wrongly showing the reader a disinterest in femininity on the part of the protagonist.
I don't suggest authors have fewer descriptions, I'm suggesting they make those descriptions more interesting. When an author says the hero is 5'4" and 110 pounds she is doing so for a reason. The author should ask herself what her purpose is in having the character that size, and then find a way to describe the character that fulfills that purpose.
Perhaps we can agree that Mark Twain was a great writer. He emphasized nouns and verbs and held adjectives and adverbs in high contempt. If the description moves the story along, it is worthy of inclusion. If the author is simply describing sunsets, it becomes purple prose. I included a description of a sky in one of my stories and spoke to the whirling blues and greys. I meant to signal internal conflict by alluding to the Civil War. One of my good friends on the other side of the pond didn't get it and thought I'd lost my "purple prose compass".
Police blotter descriptions are rarely seen in commercial writing because professional editors/agents would reject the story if they saw one. Editors and agents live by rules
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Shared points
I think we can safely agree that a description should be more than a logging of facts, which I assume is what you mean by 'police blotter' descriptions. Having spent a year of my short LEO career typing those summaries for the log at the local PD, I can assure you that at times it takes quite a lot of skill to condense a field officer's written report down to a brief, succinct paragraph. What the press did with them afterwards made me want to brain the reporter sometimes. :-)
But I digress. I took note of your comments on descriptions when you were trying to hammer my stories (and me) into shape. I've actually tried to follow that, I have one protagonist describing himself as "just an average guy, average height, average weight" like most of the underclassmen you see on a college campus. Not saying I always succeed, but . . .
Anyway, I would like to see better descriptions, by which I mean I want there to be some meat on the bones, and as you say, that meat should be presented in a way that is interesting and furthers the story.
But not everybody agrees on the line between not enough and too much. In describing that maid's uniform, what one reader might regard as fetish another would regard as important detail. When proofreading my friend's stories, I try to keep that in mind. I suggest they might want to trim some areas, but if they don't I shrug my shoulders and move on. As far as I can tell it has done no lasting damage to the stories' reception by the readers. And some of the things I think should be trimmed may be akin to your whirling blue and grey sky and I'm just too literal-minded to see the allusion.
Claws retracted, safety on, shields down.
Karen J.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Good teams find ways to win, bad teams ...
find ways to lose.
Grover, as much as it hurts to lose the chapter Angela it right, other than the inconvenience of typing all that over you have a golden opportunity to get to the meat of the story while minimizing the side dishes. Hum, I must be hungry today, maybe the wind gusting into the twenties and the minus one Fahrenheit weather we shoveled in so dad could run an errand had something to do with that.
If you can salvage some, it can help you reconstruct the chapter better than before.
As to the Packers, so many games lost late in the fourth quarter and by less than a one score’s margin. Very disappointing but could be worse, could be Detroit..
John in bloody awful cold Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
Corrupted file
You might try 'system restore' found under system tools. It will take your computer back to a period before the mess occured. It won't affect any files. Portia
Portia
You could try ..
... downloading Open Office (free ;) ) and see how that handles your corrupted file. Not saying it'll work just that it's worth trying. OpenOffice has versions of all the programs MS Office has including Word, Access and Excel so it may suit you better than your old version of MS Works in any case.
Other than that, take heart in what Angela says and you may end up feeling it's a blessing in disguise. Oh, and don't forget to back up the contents of your usb drive (on a CD/DVD?) but I'm sure you've already done that. In the days when I wrote software I was so scared of losing data I kept at least 2 back ups so there was always one that wasn't actually in the machine at up-date time :) Trying to recreate months of assembler or C just didn't bear thinking about.
Geoff
OpenOffice
Unfortunately OpenOffice won't read MS Works files. The file format is proprietary and only Microsoft knows how to read it. To convert, you'd need to save to rtf from MS Works and read that into OpenOffice. On the other hand, I use OpenOffice and find it satisfies my needs at no cost.
Saving Novels
Two thoughts:
You're no where near paranoid enough. Get a second USB drive.
and
Consider writing a new chapter in a SEPARATE file, and then, after saving, pasting it into the master, that way, every chapter has a file, and there is a master file.
This has been useful more than once.