It was late at night when my partner and I set out for our recon mission. That’s all it was meant to be – a last moment of training before the real assault into the wilds of the computer hard-drives to seek out and capture the until now elusive draft of book three of the trilogy.
After our final preparations – me a glass of wine, he a cigarette – the computer was set up in the lounge room and the training began.
“Here,” he said, handing me an already prepared drive. “Where’s your USB port?”
I plugged it in, and the computer responded instantly. In seconds, there was a window open, showing the contents of the foreign drive. We knew the book wouldn’t be there, but I looked anyway because strange things can happen at moments like these.
We then moved the base of operations into the office, and approached the pyramid of old computer towers. After removing the cover from one, my partner handed me the phillips head screwdriver and told me to be careful.
This computer had two hard-drives. Slowly, I removed the screws holding them into place, putting the screws carefully aside so they weren’t lost. One, then two hard-drives. He carried one, I the other as we trekked back to the lounge room.
“Which one’s the bottom drive?” he said. There was a moment of panic, before he decided it didn’t matter. I took the first drive out of the USB case, and put in the one I was carrying. Then we plugged it all back in, and turned it on. Seconds, and the window opened.
My heart skipped a beat. I recognised this drive – it was the copy of the laptop I had been using in 2007. And there was a folder called Opear – the old name for the gadda. I took a deep breath, and double-clicked.
Not it. There was a copy of an early draft of book one, but no book three.
“Damn,” I said. I was about to turn it off, when I noticed another folder called Archive. Maybe…
Two clicks, it opened and there was another Opear folder. I opened it, and there were three beautiful folders – Book One, Book Two, Book Three. Teeth clenched, palms sweaty, I opened the folder labelled Book Three and there they were – three drafts.
Our recon mission had become the actual mission.
“I found it, I found it,” I screamed, bouncing up and down on the couch.
“Don’t get excited yet,” cautioned my calm partner. “Open it. Make sure.”
I did, and I read the first line. Then I scrolled down and read the last line. It was all there. All 60,000 words of it. The draft of book three.
“Save it,” he said. “Use Windows Explorer to make sure.” I did. “Now, open it up from your computer hard drive, to make sure.” I did.
It worked. I had book three. There was much rejoicing.
In case you were wondering, here’s the current opening paragraph of the now recovered novel:
Hampton looked around, noted his arrival had not been observed and so walked calmly out of the alley. None of the people that walked down the footpath past him took any notice of his strange attire. He supposed that was because the sight of a grown man in what appeared to be white pyjamas was quite normal on the street outside a karate studio.
Needless to say, this is gonna change a lot. For starters, I’ve got a prologue to write, so it’s no longer gonna be para one.
But whee! I haz book!