Month: May 2024

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Lost and Perhaps Found

When I started writing around 2010, I made a point of keeping an archive of my work.

Every story and poem has its own directory, and dated revisions are kept within each one. Plain text doesn’t take up much storage space, so there’s plenty of scope to keep doing this into the future.

About two or three years ago, I was looking for a particular poem I’d written; I knew its title, many of the words, and roughly when it was written. So when the archive showed no results after several attempts, I realised my system had broken down somewhere and wrote it off as a loss. I could have reconstructed it with a little effort, but I never did.

There’s a common misconception about Snapchat that it deletes every picture you send. In fact, you can set it to keep a copy of every picture you add to the My Story feature.

Fortunately, I’d not only set this up, but I’d taken a clear picture of the original handwritten verse four years earlier – and I’m not in the habit of doing that. In February 2022, while looking for something else, I found that picture. The original verse had almost certainly been shredded along with other papers. I swiftly copied the words into a Word document and placed it in the archive.

Luckily this was only a 16-line poem. Other writers have suffered far greater losses. Jilly Cooper, for instance, lost the original manuscript of Riders on a London bus and it took her years to rewrite.

Not all losses are accidental. A significant quantity of drama has been wiped from BBC and ITV archives, including episodes of popular shows like Doctor Who and Dad’s Army. Before the advent of home video, there was little incentive to keep old programmes except to resell them overseas.

In some cases, collectors and members of the public have discovered recordings; some in great condition, others needing significant restoration. The BFI used to hold an annual screening called Missing Believed Wiped, featuring a selection of recovered footage, but I’m unable to find any recent events.

It remains a mystery whether I typed out the poem in 2018 then lost it, or whether it was never typed up in the first place. I’ve nonetheless started backing up my archive locally and online so no further mishaps should happen.

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Tackling War & Peace

Around 2015, I bought a copy of the Leo Tolstoy novel War & Peace. I say ‘novel’, but it actually comprises four volumes, telling the story of the French invasion of Russia through the eyes of four fictional families.

The book is noted for its length, but all the chapters are short enough that you can read one or two before bed; there are just a lot of chapters. That also doesn’t mean the story has been stretched out longer than it needs to be. Tolstoy has enough plot points to justify the word count.

I recently found the book again, with the bookmark still around the halfway point where I left it. I’d fallen out of the habit of reading it, and I’d really like to restart it.

My edition has character biographies at the start, but I made a decision early on that I wouldn’t try too hard to keep up with the individual characters and instead just enjoy the story.

I think my best tactic for diving back in is to devote a full day or weekend to making progress. Meanwhile, the book is now at least in a prominent place so it won’t slip my mind.2024-05-21 Fractal

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A Play on Words

Back in December 2021, Wordle started to explode in popularity, with a reported two million daily players at one point.

As a fan of word puzzles, I thought this would be right up my street. However, I’m also someone who dislikes hype, so it took me a long time to start playing. In fact, it was January 2024, exactly two years after the game was bought over by The New York Times.

I’ve now enjoyed it for 108 days straight. Around a third of these were guessed on the fourth try, with a 23-26 split between the third and fifth tries respectively, and ten that went down to the sixth guess. There have been days when I simply haven’t reached the answer, leaving me with a disappointing 94% success rate and no way to make up for it other than continuing to win until the losses are statistically insignificant.

The other word puzzle I play of a morning is Full Rainbow, which gives visitors three minutes to unscramble a seven-letter anagram. Sadly, it’s not possible to open an account to keep track of your score; you can only use the same browser and make sure not to clear your cookies. Instead, my personal aim is to be in the top 50% of players for solving it quickly.

I’ve always enjoyed word puzzles, and I was even an early adopter of sudoku before it took off in 2004. It’s probably no wonder, as my gran avidly completed the puzzles in Take a Break each week, while my grandad preferred the daily cryptic crossword.

I’m convinced he would have enjoyed Wordle because a similar deduction technique can be used for solving crosswords. For example, whenever there’s a ‘K’ at the beginning of a word, it’s unlikely to be followed by a ‘U’, or if it’s near the middle or the end of a word, there is likely to be a preceding ‘C’.

At the time of writing, Wordle gameplay remains free of charge. There has long been speculation that this might change, although it has become almost a loss leader for the paper’s subscription puzzles. Until then, I’ll keep playing, with a view to restoring my score to an acceptable level.

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Eight Weeks of Writing Group Independence

Every Tuesday, I run a writing group with a pal. Until eight weeks ago, the group was affiliated with National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo).

We broke away to form an independent group after we felt the organisation was not working in the best interests of its members. You can read a previous entry exploring the reasons for this.

In the weeks following the announcement, we fielded a few questions from members, largely to reinforce that the new group would feel as familiar as we could make it. Only a couple of people have left, but no more than would have happened anyway.

In short, it’s been something of a velvet divorce.

I’d been running the group for about nine years, while my pal came on board about two years ago. We feel we know what works with our members and what doesn’t, and this secession allows us to take our own actions without needing to toe the line of an umbrella organisation with their own differing priorities.

There are still aspects we need to work out. For instance, we have an outstanding question of how to attract new members without being overwhelmed by new recruits. This, however, is not an urgent problem and we’ll work it out in due course.