I lost the completed manuscript.

I lost the completed manuscript.

One of the reasons I am so fond of ‘The 53rd Parallel‘ is that I’ve written it twice.

Actually I have written it 100 times, I am such a determined re-writer, and since it still isn’t printed it’s very possible I am still looking for some way to improve it.

But I had finished the book and I had moved on to the second novel of what is now ‘The River of Lakes’ series, and I had finished it as well, including the 100 rewrites.  I had just started the third book of the series when one morning I sat down to get to work and no sooner had my PC fully booted itself–this was 2008–than my desktop icons began to disappear, one by one.  Watching them go, it seemed so clear what was happening, that it was a graphic illustration of a virus destroying everything on my hard drive, everything.

And I thought, with waves of nausea accompanying the thought, “Nordgren, you fool, you didn’t back up a thing.”

There was nothing left. Two of my best friends, my brother Bob and my brother-in-law Mark, both confidently sent the hard drive to data retrieval specialists they’d called on in the past, and we recovered a two page piece of the first book, titled ‘Dreams of Irish and Indians’ then, and the opening two pages of the second, ‘Worlds Between’.  But the rest was gone.

Three years, 500 pages, gone.

So I got really depressed for about a month.  And then I wrote both of them again.

And while I sure don’t recommend such radical negligence, I was delighted how frequently the stories were better told at my second attempt.