Brian Hodge

[What do you get when you cross a Storytellers Unplugged deadline with an exhausted writer who’s just finished a near-30,000-word novella that ran several thousand words more than expected? Today we get a redux: the very first column I did here, in June 2006, and which I recently tapped as supplemental material for a multipart series at my own blog.]

Several months ago, when the decade-old Hellnotes was still doing business as a weekly newsletter, before transmogrifying into a blog this May — transblogrifying, I suppose should be the new word — fellow contributor E.V.B. fired off a salvo in his monthly column that was aimed squarely between my eyes.

Well, no, it wasn’t. It would only feel that way if you were paranoid. E.V.B.’s “Writing 101” installments were full of excellent information and pointers for fledging writers, and often of value to experienced writers, too … and I just happen to run counter to one of them right down to the twisty double-helix of my being.

This particular installment dealt with writers going back to revise previously published work. E.V.B.’s position was unreservedly anti.* In a nutshell: If your work was good enough to have been published once already, leave well enough alone, get over yourself, and move along. There was a strong implication that any feeling a writer might harbor that he or she had grown in the interim and could do greater justice to the work the second time around is, well, kinda pretentious.

With apologies to none, I’ve always been one of those who refuse to leave things alone if time and greater objectivity conspire to make me see room for improvement.

Hang around long enough, and editors and publishers start to ask you for reprints. “Free money,” I’ve heard this called, because you’ve already done the work. All you have to do now is say, “Yes, thanks!”

If only it were that easy. As I’ve said elsewhere, “Whenever it’s time for a story to be collected, or reprinted in anything that comes much later than a year’s best roundup, I take another trip through it and almost invariably it sweats off a few more ounces. It serves the story well, I think, and keeps me from feeling as though it’s merely been dug out of mothballs.”

My tendency to tinker is much more prevalent when it comes to early work, and I would be surprised if that wasn’t the pattern with other chronic tweakers. Just as no one emerges from the womb fully formed, writers rarely start out with their voices fully manifested. After what must be a few million published words by now, I’m still working to refine mine.

One’s voice on the page is a product of evolution, honed through long use and critical self-appraisal. It often requires us to admit that while our works may have been good enough for somebody to publish, nevertheless, our ideas can be better and our ambitions bigger than our means of executing them.

Writers are not all of a single mind when it comes to post-pub revisions, nor should they be. If you feel that a story or a book should remain unchanged, forever reflecting the stage of development you were in at the time … well, to quote Yul Brynner, “So let it be written. So let it be done.” This is your Way, and it is faultless.

It just ain’t mine.

Around the time of E.V.B.’s column, I was spending a string of very late nights going through my 1996 novel Prototype and, I suppose, daring to imply that I really just might have grown as a writer.

Prototype was the last of four novels that came out of what I fondly remember as the Dell/Abyss years, and is slated for a hardcover edition this autumn. I’d salvaged the original computer files from a vintage floppy, which wasn’t entirely cooperative, and I needed to go through them to make sure nothing had gone horribly awry inside.

Offhand, I don’t recall if I started polishing the text on page 1 … but close enough. Reading this old work felt as though I were looking at a time capsule peppered with small but frequent sins that I’ve since tried harder not to commit. At least not as often. And a time or two, even I couldn’t figure out what the hell I’d been trying to say.

When the hardcover edition comes out, some readers will be reading it for the first time, and to them it will be entirely new. There’s no reason they shouldn’t have the best work I can deliver. I wrote the original text to the best of my ability at the time, but my best is better now.

Other readers will be returning to something they liked well enough to read again. They’ll find a novel that’s no different in content — their memories of it won’t be betrayed by characters doing things different this time around — but I hope they’re rewarded, even if subliminally, by a familiar novel that’s a bit more polished.

Here’s what it comes down to: The Dell/Abyss edition represented me in 1996. And the upcoming edition represents me now. One byline, but in a sense, two different writers.

There’s an old saying that you can’t step into the same river twice. As the water flows endlessly past, the familiar debris is swept away, fresh debris washes down from upstream, and all the while, the river has carved at its banks and resculpted the unseen silt and mud of its bed. It lives under constant renewal.

And so I have a hard time letting a work, especially an early one, wind back into print without wanting it to reflect something of what time and later work have done to whatever skills I may have. It’s no better a way than opting to not change what’s been set into type already, just a different one, coming from perhaps a different perspective on what one’s creative work represents: a static snapshot from the time and place it was written, or something drawn from a river.

It’s why Walt Whitman continued to update Leaves of Grass for nearly 40 years, why Stephen King redid the first book in his Dark Tower series, why chefs revise recipes until they’re perfect, why musicians remaster old recordings when new technology can make them sound truer to life, why George Lucas reworked the original Star Wars —

OK, bad example. But you get the idea.

Of course, we could’ve just scrapped every bit of the foregoing and defaulted to another old saying you may have heard, attributed variously to Jean Cocteau, Paul Valery, and Oscar Wilde, and whose subject alternates between art, poems, and books. But let’s take the broadest one possible:

“Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned.”

Or this one from Robert Cormier, which has its own appeal:

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”

* While I wish I could print excerpts rather than summarize, the request to do so went unanswered.

***** That multipart series at my own blog that I mentioned? An epic reader-request fulfillment, it’s a comprehensive look at taking a work from its first draft through to the last, with all the revision stages in between I could think of. It wrapped up last week after four parts and a followup postscript, “A Fine Line Between Polish And Overkill.”

[Photo by Gonzo fan2007]

In On Writing, Stephen King mentions an early rejection that was one of the best lessons he ever got. It wasn’t an encouraging letter. It barely qualifies as a note. It was just a formula that some kind editor thought might make a difference:

Second draft = First draft — 10%

I’d even go so far as to say that 15% is worth shooting for, especially if you’re prone to bouts of logorrhea. Either way, though, the payoff can mean the difference between publish and perish.

Once upon a time, I wrote a novel whose first trip out into the editorial marketplace met with not much love. I brought it back for another trip into the shop, where it sweated off an additional 15%. It’s just how the math turned out, but seemed like a good omen, since 15% is an agent’s typical commission.

Before long, the novel was the subject of a four-house auction and became the centerpiece of a six-figure year.

That I had a different agent by then undoubtedly factored in big. And maybe that I’d changed the original title, Miles To Go Before I Weep, to the punchier Wild Horses (a word savings of a whopping 66.6%). You can’t isolate individual elements and know what made how much difference.

Still, the fact remains: It was the same novel, just sleeker.

Which dovetails with this fact: Most editors aren’t going to put in the time and oversight necessary to help you turn a potentially meritorious work from a sumo wrestler into a sprinter. So they say no.

An agent might — might — but even then is likely to broad-stroke the advice: “Tighten this up, and I’ll look at it again.”

Beyond that, you’re on your own.

We’ll look for chopping-block candidates below, but first, it may be worthwhile to analyze your work habits and see if you’re giving yourself surplus verbiage just because you can.

Do You Use The Technology, Or Abuse It?

If you weren’t banging out words in the Typewriter Age, consider yourself lucky. Tweaking a finished manuscript meant using time-consuming tools like correction ribbons and Liquid Paper, which now seem about as sophisticated as medical care based on lunar phases and toad bladders. More substantial alterations might mean retyping an entire page.

Bottom line: If you wanted to change something, it had to be worth the effort. It could be tempting to let non-critical stuff slide.

For obvious reasons, word processing changed all that.

Except, for some writers, this was the worst possible tool to put in their hands. And remains so. As ever, technology is neutral. For good or for ill lies in the using.

There’s a writer whose earlier works I loved, but who after a point became, to me, almost unreadable. I believe the key to this was found in an interview I read, in which she blew wet, sloppy kisses to the whole idea of word processing: Now there was no excuse. Everything could be just the way you wanted it. You could go back and tinker to your heart’s bliss.

True enough. But this ease of redoing can break in two radically different directions.

(1) Subtractive. The writer treats early drafts like crude sculptures that still need bits chiseled away before they look right.

(2) Additive. The writer keeps pouring it on, building up words as if they were layer upon thick, blobby layer of oil paint.

One writer objectively looks for things to cut and places to condense. The other revels in how easy it is to maintain never-ending creation.

Now, #1 isn’t necessarily a virtue when the material gets scraped from lean to downright sketchy.

And #2 isn’t necessarily a vice if you’re just giving yourself more raw material to reshape later. Kinda like taking six pairs of jeans into the dressing room to find the perfect one.

Just be aware. That’s all. Awareness will eventually deepen into an instinctive sense of balance between too little and too much.

9 Places To Start Whacking

There are no templates to follow, no rules beyond this: Remain true to the work and its needs. Uniform prose, kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw, isn’t the objective. Still, when bloat happens, here are several common places it settles.

(1) Saying the same thing three times when once will do. Often, we hammer points home to convince ourselves more than the reader. Don’t worry. They’ll get it.

(2) Scenes that go on past the point of the scene. Everybody’s together, things are happening, people won’t shut up … it’s like a party where the guests won’t leave. Kick ‘em out already.

(3) Laborious descriptions of scene-setting details. Try this: The next time you’re captivated by a tale set in a place that’s visually alive in your mind’s eye, go back and see how many scenic cues there really were. There are probably fewer than you’d think. Trust your reader the way that writer trusted you.

(4) Exhaustive descriptions of characters’ appearances. Again, a few well-defined strokes are all that’s needed, and the reader will fill in the rest. Consider this self-portrait of John Lennon. How much more simplistic could it be? Yet who else could it be?

(5) The weather. I’m all for setting-as-character, but there’s a big difference between mood and meteorology … or just plain filler.

(6) Backstory that isn’t germane to current events. Sure, coming up with it helped you know the character better. But is it equally illuminating to the reader, or is it now so reflected in the character’s behavior that it goes without saying?

(7) Research whose only purpose is to show off how much research you did. You went to all that trouble to find it out. Seems a shame not to use it. Instead, look at it this way: You learned more than you needed so you could feel confident about what you left out.

(8)Passages that sounded good at the time but have absolutely no purpose whatsoever. One rejection letter of an early novel of mine cited that it had “several jolly irrelevancies,” a phrase that stung at the time, but which I’ve adored ever since.

(9) Multiple endings. Yes, it can be difficult to let go. Thus, aftermath upon aftermath, denouement after denouement. May you instead know the startling satisfaction of thinking there’s more to go, then realizing, “Oh. It’s done. Right here.”

Yes, cutting can hurt. “Kill your darlings,” Faulkner advised, and sometimes we think we hear the darlings scream. But that high-pitched sound is just the hot air squeeing from overinflated prose.

Give those wounds a few days to heal. You’ll be amazed at what you can live without.

***** Done? Oh, we’re never done. You’re always welcome over at my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “When It’s Too Jam-Packed For Comfort, Give Yourself Permission To Breathe” is huffing and puffing.

[Photo by A Little Lam]

I like life lessons that are simple enough to apply across the board, and they don’t get much more stripped-down than lessons you can learn from boxing. Win or lose, there’s something every fighter wants to be able to say after a bout: “I left it all in the ring.”

You might have heard a variation of this during last month’s Winter Olympics, from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno: “I left it all on the ice.”

Meaning that by the time the final bell rings, or the race is run, that’s it for you. You’re done in. You don’t have any more left for that day, that hour, the very next minute, and in this moment, at least, the outcome pales beside one fact that can never be taken away:

You’ve given it everything you had.

I don’t think I ever truly, madly, deeply appreciated this until last December, when I took my Krav Maga orange belt test. At first it started out fun. Then it got a little challenging. Then a lot challenging. At about hour five I joined the push-it-til-you-puke club. Came back out and dug in to finish the last 45 minutes as strongly as I could, even though I was afraid I’d blown it.

Never in my life had I been this miserable without food poisoning being involved. Got home and could barely make it up a flight of stairs, two-handing it up the rail, clump-clump, clump-clump, one step at a time. I slumped into a hot bath and … OK, I didn’t pray for death, but if I’d noticed a scythe blade in the doorway, I’d’ve told the Reaper, “Come on, ya moldy bastard, there’s an extra five in it for you if you make it quick.”

Exhilarating, though? Like nothing else. Except for one thing.

The best writing experiences I’ve ever had have left me feeling the same way. The best writing experiences I’ve ever had were the ones that concluded with a collapse. Sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. Sometimes it felt as if it were the rest of the world that had fallen away, and I lingered above it in floating tranquility.

These are the ones I remember in sensory details of time and place. These are the ones that make me wonder where the words really came from. The ones that spit me back into the world with the surreal, stumbling dislocation of a teleporting misfire. These are the ones in which I rode all the way to the end on a wave of jubilant terror that I wasn’t going to make it, but somehow did.

The ones when I left it all on the page.

As creators, we sometimes have a tendency to conserve, to hold back. Maybe it stems from the admonitions we’ve heard since childhood:

• Don’t spend it all in one place.
• Put away a little something for a rainy day.
• Be sure to save some for later.
• Put that back, you’ll spoil your dinner!

All those bits of code designed to program us into obedient, frugal, regulated little models of prudence and moderation.

Fine. Live like that away from the desk if you want to. But if you bring it to the page, it’s like showing up at the pub on Saint Paddy’s Day wearing a solemn face and a T-shirt that says, “Kiss me, I’m Amish.”

This creative reticence comes in two major forms:

(1) The temptation to hold back ideas

Tell me you haven’t been here before: You’re about to introduce a character, inject an idea, or just lay down a nice turn of phrase … and then stop. Not because it isn’t good enough, but because it seems too good for now.

You want to save it for later. Later in the same work. Later in life, for another work altogether.

Don’t. Don’t sit on it.

Introduce it, inject it, lay it down now.

You’ll never have quite this same blend of energy and enthusiasm and freshness again. Ideas left to ripen have a way of going stale, shrinking as the juice evaporates through their skin.

You’re sending yourself a bad message, too: that the well is running low, so you better not drink as deep, or that you’re incapable of coming up with an even better idea when you think you’ll actually use this one.

Ideas are there to be used, not rationed.

(2) The impulse to hold back ourselves

Like an archaeological dig, writing fiction proceeds in layers. When you do it right, you’re doing more than uncovering the intricacies of story and character, the minutiae you couldn’t be aware of during the planning phase. You’re revealing pieces of yourself, too, maybe parts you didn’t know about, or didn’t understand, or were afraid to confront or embrace.

Sometimes it all spills out the first trip through. Other times it builds up little by little, another thin, sedimentary layer with each pass of revision.

Whatever works.

As a reader, the stuff that gets to me, stays with me, makes me want to come back for more, isn’t the stuff that skims the surface. It’s not the stuff that reads like a padded outline or a head exercise with no investment of heart. All top motion. All ripples and no undertow.

Instead, what hooks me are the ones where I get a sense of the writer having dived as deep as she possibly could to get to the truth of her tale, not stopping until she was up to her elbows in the silt at the bottom.

For myself — and from myself — I don’t want the novel, the story, that anyone could have written, given access to the same notes. I want the version only one of us could’ve written. The version pulsing with a feeling that, to the author, every day and every paragraph mattered as much as breathing.

I know — they all feel like they do, at the time. Even the ripple-skimmers.

It doesn’t always translate. Not when it hasn’t been pushed sufficiently hard. Whatever lay behind it, not everything made it all the way to the page. Instead of going for more sweat, tears, blood, and heart rate, somebody settled for his idea of close enough and called it a day.

The orange belt test…

As it turned out, I passed. But I had serious doubts. Didn’t feel one bit good about how I’d done, and they don’t pass you for showing up. They don’t even pass you for finishing.

Just as editors and publishers don’t say yes simply on the basis of your having a completed manuscript. The same way readers don’t love something just because you wrote “The End.”

Instead, Yes and Love are earned through toil that sometimes hurts. A lot. I got the impression I’d earned that new color coding not in the first five hours, but in those last 45 minutes.

It’s true, though — no single work can be everything to everybody. Regardless of how deep you dug or dove, not everyone is going to get it. That’s OK. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how many do.

The surest way to get there? Again, boxing has an answer, in something fighters are always wise to do: Never leave it in the judges’ hands.

Meaning that win, lose, or die trying…

They go for the knockout every time.

by Brian Hodge

[Podcast edition available through iTunes, or here.]

It’s been an introspective year, 2007 has. Back in January — a month that doesn’t seem as though it should be coming around again so quickly — I felt compelled to spend some time really thinking about what I do, in the writerly sense, and how I’ve gone about it. The instincts and strategies that have helped move me forward to where I want to go; the blunders and bad habits that have done the opposite.

This seems like time especially well spent in a phase of transition, as I’ve worked lately to head in directions I’ve not gone before, or as much as I would like to, and slough off old skin as well.

And so: What continues to be relevant and helpful? Is there anything that used to be, but no longer is, yet I still do it anyway because that’s the way I’ve always done it? What should I never have done in the first place?

This month and next, I’ll be hitting much of what I came up with. If it has any value at all, it’s probably for newer writers still picking their way along. And even then, what worked for me won’t necessarily be right for someone else. The screw-ups, though? Those are probably best avoided on general principles. Bone-headed moves are always bone-headed, no matter who does them.

This month, the right of it all, and I hope nothing here comes off as arm-twisting back-pats of self-congratulatory wankery. I’ve lapsed on nearly all of them at one time or another. But they’ve at least been there like north on a compass, something to turn back to when I’ve gotten lost.

I concentrated more or less equally on short stories and novels.

This may be one of the top three questions beginning writers ask: “Which should I do: Concentrate on short stories at first? Or go right to a novel? Or both?”

The only answer, of course, is yes. Whichever you find most compelling. Whatever you’ll find the most creatively fulfilling. You might as well be fulfilled, because, to be blunt, when you begin nobody’s out there waiting for what you’re doing. Except maybe your mom. But if you’re at least doing what excites you most, that’s more likely to feed your momentum until someone out there actually is waiting for what you come up with next.

For me, it made the most sense to take parallel tracks. Short stories provided quick gratification, extra income, publishing credits, and early visibility. They were a home-study course in learning my craft, which couldn’t help but carry over to the novels. A few stories even grew into novels. Many stories have been resold, reprinted, translated … a source of further exposure and income that doesn’t require further work. I’ve rarely said no to an invitation to contribute to a book or magazine, because it’s a chance for more of everything.

Plus you never know who may be reading. The most longstanding relationship I’ve had so far with a book editor began when she read a story of mine in an obscure little magazine, and wrote to ask if I had a novel to send her. Within hours, by providential coincidence, a fellow editor brought her a manuscript of mine already under submission at the house, and said, “This seems more like your kind of thing.”

I put myself in situations where things could happen.

Writing is a profession whose business is largely conducted at long distances. Making living, breathing (not too heavily, though) contact with the people whose ranks you hope to join may be the closest thing to a fast track a novice writer can hope to find. It puts a face with a name, or at least connects to Woody Allen’s observation that most of life and success is just about showing up.

Getting my first literary agent came directly out of attending a weeklong writers conference when I had exactly one small press short story sale. I received the kind of encouragement there that can sustain a person through long, often discouraging struggle. Best of all, I made a couple of lifelong friends whose influence has been such that I can’t imagine life without having met them. Any one of which was worth infinitely more than the price of admission.

Quality control has always been paramount.

Near the end of his life, Orson Welles went stumping for budget vintners Ernest and Julio Gallo. He ended each commercial intoning the infamous line “We will sell no wine before its time.”

Wisdom doesn’t come from much cheesier sources than that, but something about it sunk in. Welles’s big, bearded face has hovered in memory like a scowling headmaster ever since.

Whether a project is on spec, or asked or contracted for in advance, I’ve always been loathe to send it out or turn it in unless I’m convinced it’s the best it can possibly be. That seems like a no-brainer, so fundamental it should go without saying. Yet more than once I’ve seen writers, pros even, admit that they’ve turned stuff in knowing it fell short of what they were capable of.

Personally, there’s no such thing as good enough if I feel it’s within my power to do better. That’s not to say someone else couldn’t have done it much better, or that I couldn’t have done it better myself at a later date … but at the time, it’s the best I can make it.

The most ludicrous example was a Shakespearian spoof. It took weeks to get the language feeling right, and the pay was miniscule to begin with, so I probably ended up slaving away for twenty-five cents an hour … but I’m still glad I did it.

I’ve tried to resist the notion that my words are too precious to benefit from editorial attention.

Every so often you’ll hear of a bestselling author who wrangles a contract that prohibits anyone at the publishing house from changing so much as one word of the manuscript.

Often, you can tell. And not in a good way.

Yeah, I went through an early cocky phase. What were those first few short story sales if not proof of gilded perfection? But then, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it was really quite amazing to see how much editors learned in the next few years.

I learned to love the revision process.

In the earliest days of my career, Robert R. McCammon told me that he disliked the rewrite phase; that once something was freshly done, further work on it felt to him like beating a dead horse. When I confessed that I honestly enjoyed revising, he told me this was going to serve me well.

I can only believe it has. Because, once something of mine is freshly done, I usually feel like I’ve just given birth to a dead horse. It’s hideous to behold: the stink … the five-and-a-half malformed limbs … and the faces, o god, its grimacing and accusatory faces! That repulsive scorched mass of king crab legs and Siberian Huskies in John Carpenter’s The Thing…? That’s my first draft.

But a funny thing happens. Some amputations and grafts, lots of cuts and suturing, an infusion of recombinant DNA and a few harnessed lightning strikes later, and that streamlined critter starts to twitch. It’s jolly fun, making order out of chaos. It’s alchemy and theurgy and sometimes the biggest set of Leggos in the world.

When it seemed relevant, I tried to work within the overlapping fascinations that I knew I shared with an editor.

More than once, when a story sale wasn’t a sure thing — I didn’t have a guaranteed slot in an anthology, say — I took a few steps toward securing that sale by trying to build the story around subjects and/or aesthetics that I knew would likely appeal to the editor.

Pandering? Not if what I’m writing about is something that cranks my passions as well. It’s more like trying to initiate a conversation that the editor and I can both participate in, with equal enthusiasm. And editors who really like what you have to say are more apt to come back to hear more. It’s worked out well, and in one instance a one-off story turned out to be an inadvertent proving ground that later led directly to a book deal.

If you were to ask my friend J.C. Hendee how to get published, you’d likely hear his standard answer: “Write something that someone will want to read.”

That starts with the editor. In other words, it never hurts to know your market, and your first market is the person who decides the fate of your work.

I try to remember to say thanks.

I don’t remember when, but at some point I got in the habit of sending notes to the editors of anthologies that had just come out with stories of mine in them, or magazines whose new issue had an interview, and so on. Just a quick note to say thanks. I read about someone else who did this and thought it was a good idea.

After one exchange, a prominent editor with a wall full of books to his credit, wrote back to say that “thank you” was something he hardly ever heard.

Time is a valuable commodity, yes, but it just takes a couple minutes to convey appreciation to someone, and a little goodwill can go a long way sometimes.

When online war breaks out, I turn Swiss.

Remember when you were in gradeschool and a fight would break out, and everyone scrambled over to watch? You can see that 24/7 on the internet.

Unfortunately, I’m one of those dull bastards who’d rather peacefully co-exist with others — or barring that, ignore them — than devote time and energy to ripping them new assholes … and thereby looking like one in the process.

Is this wise, since some writers seem to have successfully adopted hostile proctology as part of their promotional strategy? I don’t know. I can, however, guarantee there are writers I’m unlikely to ever read because of the way I’ve seen them treat other people.

It can be argued that one thing has nothing to do with the other. Here’s Orson Welles again, this time from a far better source, The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Point taken. Still, my bookshelves are too full of writers about whom I feel favorable, or neutral, to turn space over to those whose countenances seem to have taken on an odd, puckered overlay of pinkish-brown. And I doubt I’m alone in that.

I let the pain and loss of others be my motivation.

Apologies in advance. This is one of those things that can make people who don’t do it feel they’re being badgered for their own good. So, sorry … really.

The earliest computer-oriented tale of writer’s woe I heard came from a guy who’d recently whipped his new novel across the finish line in a blistering white heat, writing the last 20+ pages nonstop. During this entire gallop, he never once hit Save. And right as he got to the end, the power went out. Gone. All gone.

Oh, he re-created what he lost, but the trauma was still palpable in the telling.

I couldn’t imagine a reaction that wouldn’t involve a razor or a noose. This was never going to happen to me, I vowed. And it hasn’t. But hitting Command-S so often as to constitute a nervous tic is just the beginning.

The methods and thoroughness have evolved over time, but by now all my work, e-mail, contacts, etc., are backed up to an external drive on an hourly basis. The rest of the system, weekly or better. It happens automatically. It has to, because I’m lazy and can procrastinate on drudgework to the point of barnacle growth.

But there’s really no excuse anymore. Hard drive space costs dimes per gigabyte now, and backup software is cheap, sometimes even free with the drive.

Yet writers still gamble with years of their working lives. I saw the worst-case outcome again just the other day, a writer posting about a hard drive crash devouring her contacts, ongoing interviews, and more … and the kicker, a quote of $1000 for recovery services to retrieve lost files. Why do hard drive recovery techs charge so much? Because they can.

The math is easy: $100 for a capacious backup drive and an hour or two of set-up time? A bargain. The peace of mind? Priceless. In almost 17 years since migrating from typewriter to computer, I can’t recall having lost anything more than a few minutes’ work due to the occasional power outage, and if I were really fanatical about it, I’d get an uninterrupted power supply, too.

Bottom line, if I’m going to be egregiously late in delivering work, it shouldn’t be due to some entirely avoidable reason like my computer ate my homework. Nay, let it happen for some far, far better thing than I have ever done — say, something involving a case of Bushmill’s, a couple of America’s Next Top Model washouts, and four or five llamas.

But that’s a story for another installment. If, um, it happens.

Next month, the flipside of this one: the self-flagellation.