Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: March 15, 2010

Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.

But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

(Read the rest at NY Times online.)

so that's what they meant...

I have to write an additional 50 - 70k words to make my book "presentable" to a literary agent1. I don't remember if I mentioned this before to the "general public," although I know I've told random individuals during chat. So. So what I'm doing is going through the whole thing, again, and trying to see where I can just, y'know, casually toss in a couple thousand more words. Basically I'm doing a heck of a lot of story filling and world building. Having to do this made me realize that my story has good bones (I hope!) but probably doesn't have enough meat on it. It also made me realize this is probably an outworking of writing so much fanfic. You don't have to do world-building with a lot of fanfiction and, as with anything, when you get out of the habit you "forget" how to do it. Even the section of the book that I think is a monster is probably more bones than meat. Really, really tall bones... Anywho, so I'll be posting regular word count meter-y things.

Now I understand why the writers I follow like rj_anderson and marthawells will have posts that say something like "I've got 18,000/30,000 left to go, gang." *nods*

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1. Information for the approximate length a novel should be before being queried to a literary agent found at Agent Query, a site regularly mentioned on the blogs of by well known lit agents such as Nathan Bransford.