RS, Author, Novelist, ProsaistJan 6, 2024

Got down to #author stuff, now that I'm retired and can devote time to the #business of #writing #fiction. First order of business: catalog the unsold novels from after the burn out that need revision and rewrites.

Turns out that disconnecting my Mac from my work VPN messed up my folders. I had somehow mapped (don't know the Mac term) my work Windows computer folders to the Mac, and when I look in documents it tries to find it on the network and fails. If I reboot, so long as I go directly from my user's directory to documents directory, I'm good. If I click on Documents in Finder, it redirects and I'm screwed.

First thing I did was copy all my writing folders to the desktop. At least I've lost none of my old novels and short work.

I thought there were 7 completed books, and I said so online. There are actually 9, three that form a trilogy and one novel with a sequel in the mix. There are two incomplete novels.

Some works are older than others. Pages refuses to open one novel from 1996, a fun space opera that possibly has the highest chance of early sales. I haven't tried the others. Now I gotta install Word, of which I am not a fan, and investigate programs that'll open the really old files. If anyone wants to chime in with suggestions, please do! (I can always find someone with a Windows machine if need be.) Putting Google on TODO. I actually have original copies of chapters from my Apple ][ days, but thankfully I updated those to the Mac and to a new millennium version of Word in what were my PowerPC days.

Incidentally, there really are three novellas in good shape.What surprises me though? There looks like about 15 short stories, many complete because I see multiple submissions in the various folders. I completely forgot about these, and was sure I never wrote short-form.

Baby steps, I guess.

#writingLife #writingCommunity #writersOfMastodon

Show threadSteven D. Brewer 🏳️‍⚧️Jan 6, 2024
@sfwrtr You might find that Libreoffice is actually better at reading old Word files than Word.
Show threadRS, Author, Novelist, ProsaistJan 7, 2024

@stevendbrewer

"You might find that Libreoffice is actually better at reading old Word files than Word."

Yep. Word can't read files prior to 1994.I finally got my links to my writing ironed out and content backed up into the cloud (what a pain), though it is in Time Machine, so I installed the newest Mac version of #LibreOffice.

I opened a 1992 file. Check.
I opened a 1989 file. Well, all the lowercase "a"s are converted to circumflex characters, but I can work with that.

I figured out (finally) how to search for dates on my Mac and found a story treatment named "The Revenger" (no extension, Mac naturally!). The date is Mar 25, 1986.

It opened with a few box characters, but otherwise readable. It looks like my attempt at an Andre Norton type SF space opera. It even opened "Tree Castle", which is or probably was a Mac Draw document. It was dated Jan 1, 1986. It's my oldest document. I've a screen cap below of the mentioned documents open in LibreOffice.

Yeah, for document conversion, LibreOffice rocks. The content of some of these old documents is amateurish; weird since I was already published.

Still... No lost IP. This is a good thing.

cc: @taur10 @alan

#writing #writer #author #writersofmastodon #writingcommunity #fiction #writinglife #fiction #sf #ScienceFiction #spaceopera

Show threadSeph HarrisonJan 7, 2024
@sfwrtr @alan @stevendbrewer Gotta love open source, usually people who need something that either isn't available, or costs too much, so they fix it themselves.
Show threadRS, Author, Novelist, ProsaistJan 7, 2024

@taur10 @alan @stevendbrewer
I do like it when they fix issues, though statistically speaking, for the few open source projects I've used and filed bug reports for, only one item got fixed after a few years. Often I get a snitty reply that suggests I fix it myself. Not implying everyone or even a small fraction of OS devs have that attitude, but the fixing of other's issues is pretty low priority. Of course, I got the same attitude of M$. But then, it's M$. Apple is a bit better (only a bit).

Pardon the rant. Retired dev recently forced as a last project to work on Open Source Zowe implementations—but no longer working!

Show threadAlan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏

@sfwrtr @taur10 @stevendbrewer I get that "you fix it" attitude rarely and my response is typically along the lines of "ok, can you create a branch? I'm gonna need to port this to Visual Basic first" [you want dev attitude, I got dev attitude 😉 ]. I've been on strictly volunteer projects though, and a lot of it depends on how many users a bug affects and if the original dev is still contributing or not.

In the case of LibreOffice, they've got enough funding to hire people so bugs get fixed.

Jan 7, 2024 at 11:36pmWeb
Show threadRS, Author, Novelist, ProsaistJan 7, 2024

@alan @taur10 @stevendbrewer

"ok, can you create a branch? I'm gonna need to port this to Visual Basic first"

😅​ Seriously, I do git it. There are many nations out there: #Windows, #Linux, #Mac, #zos and languages like #BASIC and #APL.

"I get that "you fix it" attitude rarely... "

I'm glad to hear it. But even asking me to branch is beyond my pay grade, and of most of the user base's comprehension. Neither the spouse or grannie are going to get this.

I was working with open source #Zowe stuff for three years, but then the Open #Mainframe Project fielded a mandatory conformance project I had to contribute to. The .md instructions were so bad, I had to rewrite them (RS is an #Author). In any case, they required me to do a #GitHub "pull request" to check-in my contribution (a json file) and for the .md file.

/RS.exe crashed at that point./

I pawned the project off on one of my Linuxy coworkers. Open source #programming is likely something people get really used to, but if you are a mainframer, Javascript and C programmer, or a Windows programmer, that's simply is Greek and is just one more thing to learn when I have no time because I have a dozen things to get done first.

Shoot. Ranted again. #ADHD Please forgive me!

Show threadAlan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏Jan 8, 2024

@sfwrtr @taur10 @stevendbrewer You are not alone. Adapting to git is a pain in the ass, especially for old fart coders like us, let alone non-coders. I seriously wish Linus Torvalds liked Mecurial better. Similar distributed model, but IMO about 10 times easier to understand.

Rant on, rant on...

Show threadRS, Author, Novelist, ProsaistJan 8, 2024
@alan @taur10 @stevendbrewer
For local/remote LAN stuff, I just used Eclipse's built-in, and more recently, VS Code's built in. Code even works with GitHub, but this "pull request" thing just broke me.
Show threadAlan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏Jan 8, 2024
@sfwrtr @taur10 @stevendbrewer The nomenclature is {set generosity=max} not intuitive. How "ask a remote repo to merge your changes" turned into "pull" is beyond me, but there it is.
Show threadDeirdre Saoirse MoenJan 9, 2024

@alan @sfwrtr @taur10 @stevendbrewer

Huh, as an old fart coder, I find git the most comprehensible system I’ve used in the post “print a new copy and date stamp it” era.

Show threadSteven D. Brewer 🏳️‍⚧️Jan 9, 2024
@deirdresm @alan @sfwrtr @taur10 I can use git in very simplistic ways, personally. But I've never been able to wrap my head around using it as part of a collaborative workflow. I'm sure I could figure it out if I had to, but luckily those days are past me.