Seeing Stars

Or how Microsoft made me lose the will to live.

I find that the back stories for characters can take on a life of their own 

With a critical eye on the structure of Tankard’s Legacy’s yet to be titled sequel, I realised that the personal history for James Tankard had started to grow with the tenacity and reach of a creeping vine. My research had led me to Ireland, the Philippines, Jamaica, even Orkney. Left brain told me: highlight and delete. Right brain was a little more cautious…this was a story ..in its own right. Hold on there a darn minute!

I considered the popularity of the ‘chapbook’ format. Cheaply printed, affordable, the very first pulp fiction that,once read by the whole family, would be recycled as kindling or bum fodder. Thus, there are very few surviving copies to peruse, perhaps the odd Victorian miscellany of songs and scores calling itself a chapbook, but certainly not the well-thumbed pamphlet of 'Moste Terrible Tales' that I envisaged.

So, why not write my own chapbook of that olde pyrate Tankard’s adventures upon the high seas as related by an amanuensis well-versed in his life history? 

My thoughts turn to Aphra Benn who has to be one of the most intriguing women of her age. Her most famous work is 'Orinoco', inspired by her travels to Surinam, South America. No one seems to know for sure what took her so far from home, but it is likely she was involved in espionage on behalf of Charles II, since she was granted an interview with him soon after her arrival back in England. While there, she was perfectly placed to garner information about deputy governor Byam and his shenanigans, which was of great interest to a king fast losing control of the greedy souls exploiting the riches of the New World in his name.

I can’t help but feel it’s something of a liberty to presume to know a real historical character well enough to include them as a character in my book. Perhaps I am just afraid because I lack the profound knowledge and acuity of Hilary Mantel in transforming the dry facts of history into stunning interpretive fiction . Or, perhaps nearer the truth, I just like to pull someone out of history and make them my own without the responsibility of living up to historical fact. 

The lives of Cheng I Sao, Alexander Selkirk, Woodes Rogers, William Dampier have all fed into my stories, but James has been manufactured from scratch, albeit with a physical resemblance to a certain public figure based in my locale. Deciding on the chapbook format gave me free rein to indulge my imagination in inventing his life and history and away I went. I cut and pasted the existing text into a new Word document and spent the next two hours spinning the yarns of his history.

Then I blinked. 

Why were my contact lenses suddenly fuzzy? 

I peered more closely at the document and my heart began to pound. I felt slightly lightheaded. Every character in my 5-page document had been transformed into an asterisk.

What had I done? What hadn’t I done? 

With growing horror I packed up my laptop and sprinted across town to the Mac shop. My beautiful, slim, silver lappy was slowly succumbing to some tubercular cyber-disease, killing off my documents one by one…so I thought.

The boys at the Mac shop soon realised otherwise. They’d witnessed disappeared wedding photos and missing dissertations, and done their utmost to rehabilitate tearful customers beating their heads on the floor in despair. However, they’d never seen a document turned into stars. 

“I don’t think we can do anything,” they warned me. “It looks like a Microsoft issue.”

And it was. 

Ipad in hand, compassionate computer nurse, Sam soon found a forum of fellow victims.  Windows 2011 was the culprit. Like me they'd just been hammering away at the keyboard for hours only to watch their hard work turn into nothing. Even the saved document was corrupted. Unless you’d backed it up. I’d been about to…but too late. 

Aren’t you always just about to back up when these things happen?

Outrage, fury…resignation. By the time I’d taken leave of the Mac boys, I felt utterly drained. That a company is so huge and invulnerable it can roll out a product with such an unholy glitch bothers me immensely.  But The Mac guys were so sympathetic, so determined to unearth any possibility of resurrecting my work, it was salve to the blow MS had delivered. 

I reminded myself – this could have happened to the document of my new novel, instead of the first chunk of a novella  That could have meant losing six hours of pure, intense, in-the-zone creativity.  Then I remembered that I had actually printed out the original back story of James Tankard. It wasn’t beyond redemption. Perhaps this time round I’d write it even better.

One thing is for sure - this time round, I’ll write in Pages!