Electronic Records Fail!

[lydamorehouse]

I need to get to work on my revisions, but first I have to rant about my own stupidity. I was looking at fiction markets for a friend, and I noticed that there were a few that will take reprints and I started thinking, "What do I have that I could consider sending in?" My mind went back to my very first published science fiction story, "Twelve Traditions" which appeared in the May issue of SF AGE (now defunct.) I have about two zillion paper copies of the magazine because, as I mentioned, it was my first EVA professionally published short story (technically I'd sold "Irish Dreams" to Dreams of Decadance, but at the time that mag was considered semi-pro.)

Do I have an electronic copy of that story anywhere?

Oh, sure, one of those little square disk-thingies probably has a version of it, but do I have one on any media I can ACTUALLY READ!!!????

No.

The ironic part of this? I should know better. My partner can laugh right into my face when she reads this. Shawn, if you don't know, is an electronic records specalist (among her many duties at the Minnesota Historical Society) and I've listened to her practice her talks about migration and all the things you need to do in order to keep your files readable in the future.

I should also note that my made-of-awesome archivist partner DOES, in point of fact, have CDs which we can still read on our tower computer that have back-ups of all my writing files from as far back as September 2001. Given that the short story I'm looking for was published in 1999, I had hope that I would have kept an electronic copy of it... but no. So all the blame falls squarely on my shoulder. In fact, I can very easily see me saying to myself, "Well, this is in print now. Why would I ever need another copy of it?"

I have a partial of it on my website, but not the whole thing. I think one of my weekend projects after I finish my revisions and do some more work on the NEW short story I've been plotting, is to sit down with the magazine and re-key the damn thing.

*sigh*

Comments

[sg1scribe.livejournal.com]

I've had to do the re-keying thing with early published work. I found it impossible not to edit as I went!

[john jackson (from livejournal.com)]

Can't you scan it into a .pdf or .tiff file? Then through the miracle of Optical Character Recognition turn it into a Word file! Sure, you'd have to clean it up and format it, but it would be easier to do that than to retype the whole thing.

jpj

[lydamorehouse]

Ah, of course, to do that, I'd have to have one of these scanners you speak of....

[john jackson (from livejournal.com)]

You can't just go to Kinkos or something? Surely they have such things in this day and age.

OR

Send me two copies of the magazine. One I will scan and .pdf and OCR for you. The other you should sign for me and I will keep it in a chamber filled with argon behind bulletproof glass (like they do with the Declaration of Independence). The first Morehouse published piece! KaChing!

[lydamorehouse]

You're on!

But, uh... about the resale value of my short story..... um.....

little square things

[(Anonymous)]

Alternatively, you could send me the floppy(s); we still have disk drives on all of our beasts because the machine that runs Denise's Brailler is pre-USB. Can easily enough convert them to CD-R, or even transfer to a flash drive, if you'd like.

Also have a scanner, but that's another story. And a ZIP drive, but thankfully migrated all of those files to CD years ago. Though I still haven't thrown out the disks...

Frank
who lives in the Garden of Archaic Computer Peripherals...