Saturday, October 6, 2012

Sad News About Second Novella

Image Updated 1-8-13
Just as Jonco Bugos (Michael Casher's literary pen name) was very optimistic about completing his second literary novella (and Michael Casher's 9th book), a tragic event occurred. Michael writes all his fiction on a Canon StarWrtiter JET 4000 word processor, not on a computer. "The Truth Is a Lone Assassin" is no exception. When  each book is completed, the chapters get "exported" to another floppy disk that is formatted for his PC. Michael "builds" the book on his PC and uploads the paperback files to his printed book publisher (Lulu.com) and the ebook files to Amazon.com for the Amazon Kindle Store.


Well, we're sorry to break this sad, disturbing news to you but earlier this evening Michael (Jonco) discovered that two of the eight chapters that he'd written so far have been permanently deleted from the word processor's floppy disk. No backup disk was made because Michael ran out of floppys years ago and they're almost impossible to find anymore. That's right. Chapters 1 and 6 mysteriously disappeared from the floppy disk files and no other copies exist.

That's 30 pages of writing down the drain. Not 30 regular pages of science fiction but 30 pages of literary fiction that is not easily written. Those two chapters contained fifteen pages each and cannot be rewritten from memory. As this time, Michael Casher is at a loss as to what to do or say. What's worse is that this isn't the first time this has happened. Fifteen pages of Blind Fool Running vanished from the word processor screen one day in 2007 as Michael (Jonco) was just finishing up a very productive writing session. Three years ago he felt good enough, physically, to rewrite those pages from memory. But not anymore. The first chapter of The Truth is a Lone Assassin took Michael six months to write. And now two crucial chapters are lost forever.

Michael's pretty upset and pretty down, right now. That's all we can say for now. Sorry about that. "The Truth Is a Lone Assassin" was slated for publication in December 2012. Now, we're just not sure about that or if and when that novella will be completed.