Death of a Manuscript

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Dealing with the loss of my own unpublished words.

Last week, I discovered that a file containing the manuscript for a novel I was working on was gone.

The file lived in my laptop, which is what I was using to write it. It was backed up on my main computer’s hard disk. I had decided two or three months ago to keep working copies of all my fiction on my iDisk space. (iDisk is part of the .Mac services available for Macintosh users. It gives you 1 GB of storage space on an Apple server that can be shared among all of your computers.) The idea was that by keeping the files there, I could work on them from any computer and always have the most recent version.

Somewhere along the line, while copying the folder containing this file to my iDisk space, the file was lost. I’m not sure how it happened, but I do recall getting an error message when I made the copy. I should have investigated more closely, but I didn’t. The file was gone and because I didn’t work on it for months, I didn’t realize it was gone.

The backup copy, of course, was lost in my February hard disk crash.

I spent most of a day playing with file recovery software to get the file back. I managed to retrieve about 2 of the 97 pages I’d written.

Obviously, I’m not very happy about this. I’d been working on this project on and off for about four years. There was a lot of me in it. I’d written a lot of good dialog and some pretty strong scenes. It wasn’t perfect — the characterization on a few of the characters was just not good enough — but what was good was very good. A lot of “keeper” stuff in there.

And now its gone.

I find the task of recreating this work daunting. Lately, I just don’t feel that I have the writing skills I need to write fiction. I have my outline, my index cards for scenes, my character notes. I can clearly remember lots of the scenes and even some of the dialog. But I don’t feel confident that I can rewrite what I lost. I know that when it comes time to sit down and type it all back into my word processor, there will be something lacking. It just won’t be as good or as complete.

Fortunately, this was the only manuscript I lost (other than the partially completed Chapter 6 of my Excel for Windows book, which was easy, if not tedious, to recreate). My other fiction manuscripts remain safe, now backed up to three places. But although I’ve been toying with them for far longer — one of them originates back in my teenage years when I wrote longhand in spiral bound, college ruled notebooks — the loss of this one seems to hurt more. It was a more mature work, a more marketable work. It, unlike my other fiction scribbling, had a future, possibly in print.

Time is now my main obstacle to picking up this work and recreating it. I’m juggling two jobs: as a technical writer and a helicopter pilot. I’m having a hard enough time getting both of those jobs done. At the end of a working day, I’m mentally exhausted and not prepared to tackle a recreational writing assignment. (That’s one of the reasons I do 90% of my blogging first thing in the morning.) So who knows when this work might be resurrected?

Perhaps it’s something to look forward to in my retirement years.

In-Flight “Emergency”…

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…on a check ride.

There’s no better way to test a pilot on his or her knowledge of emergency procedures than to simulate an in-flight unusual situation. I hesitate to use the word emergency here, because what most check pilots simulate is not really a full emergency. It’s more of a situation that requires the pilot’s attention, knowledge of procedures, judgement, and action.

Real Throttle Chops are a Thing of the Past

Gone (or almost gone) are the days when helicopter flight instructors or examiners did “throttle chops.” A throttle chop is a simulated engine failure in which the instructor or examiner twists the throttle to idle suddenly during flight. The engine and rotor RPM needles split and the rotor RPM needle immediately starts to drop. The student or pilot in command is required to immediately enter an autorotation. The experts estimate that the pilot has about two seconds to react properly. Failure to react could lead to unrecoverable low rotor RPM, which is a very bad thing.

Flight instructors and examiners pretty much stopped doing real throttle chops — the kind with absolutely no warning to the student — when helicopters started crashing. It seemed that in some cases, the student pilot or pilot in command wouldn’t react fast enough and the instructor or examiner didn’t either. Or, in some rare cases, the sudden reduction in power caused the engine to hiccup and really fail. Now most instructors usually warn the student in advance. Some slowly reduce the throttle, which leads to an audible change in engine sound that warns the student — not to mention that he or she can usually feel the adjustment in his or her collective hand. Others do a throttle chop and enter the autorotation at the same time, not even giving the student a chance to react.

Robinson Helicopter issued several safety notices recommending against throttle chops (see SN-27 and SN-38). The company even amended its Pilot Operating Handbook so practice autorotations would be done with just a tiny needle split rather than a full throttle-to-idle setting. (Not a very good simulation of an engine failure, if you ask me.)

So What’s an Instructor/Examiner to Do?

One of the instructor/examiners I’ve worked with in the past was extremely fond of failing instruments or illuminating warning lights. This particular instructor, who works for Robinson Helicopter, has a whole collection of circuit breaker tricks that he uses on unsuspecting students. He’ll pull an engine tach circuit breaker so the engine tachometer drops to 0 during flight. No lights, just that dead gauge. He does it to see how long before the pilot notices and whether the pilot knows what do do about it. He’ll do the same for other gauges that are important but not vital to safe flight.

I took my commercial check ride with this particular instructor/examiner and he made me do a run-on landing with “failed” engine tachometer, rotor tachometer, and governor (switch the governor off to simulate). The trick was to make very small collective inputs and hope the mechanical correlator would keep the RPM within range; listening to the sound of the engine helped a tiny bit. But I still managed to make that low rotor RPM horn go off as we approached the runway surface. Evidently, I exercised enough finesse, because although he was disappointed that the horn had come on, he didn’t fail me for it. Personally, I like to see him do it perfectly.

(A side note here. What real-life situation would require you to land with all that stuff inoperable? The only thing I can think of is a complete electrical failure. But even then, I think there’s some trick in the Robinson wiring scheme that keeps the tachs alive. Just can’t remember what it might be right now. Guess I need to look it up.)

My Recent Mechanical Failure

I’ve taken 6 check rides since I started flying about 8 years ago: 1 private, 1 commercial, and 4 Part 135s. There’s usually some kind of simulated failure during a flight. So when the Aux Fuel light came on during my most recent check ride on Thursday, my first inclination was to ask the examiner, “Did you do that?”

“What?”

We were doing an instrument approach at Williams Gateway Airport and I think he was paying more attention to my altimeter (I was supposed to be at 1880 feet) than anything else.

“That light,” I replied.

He saw the light. “No,” he said.

I didn’t believe him and asked him again. He repeated that he wasn’t responsible.

“Is the circuit breaker out?” I asked.

He looked down at the bank of circuit breakers at the base of his seat. “Yes.”

“Okay, it’s not a big deal,” I said. “It’s the auxiliary fuel pump. It’s a redundant system and we don’t need it for flight. The book says land as soon as practical. Do you want to push the circuit breaker back in?”

“No.”

(For the record, I would have.)

“Well, how about if we land here and have Kelly look at it?” I suggested. Kelly is my helicopter mechanic. By some unbelievable stroke of luck, we were landing at the airport where he was based and it wasn’t 5 PM yet.

He agreed that would be a good idea and talked to the tower for me. He then directed me to parking. I set it down in one of the helicopter parking spaces that Silver State uses. He pushed the circuit breaker back in. It popped back out. He got out to track down Kelly while I cooled down the engine and shut down.

Long story short: Kelly pulled off the side panel and found that one of the bolts on top of the fuel pump was loose. He removed the pump, bench tested it, tightened up the bolts, wrote up a logbook entry on a sticker for me, and sent us on our way. The whole process took a little more than an hour. The pump sounded much better when I primed the engine for startup and the light didn’t come on again as we did some more maneuvers at Williams Gateway and flew back to Scottsdale.

I passed the check ride. I like to think that the failed fuel pump helped me. It showed that I knew enough about the procedure to stay calm and make the right decision about it. In a way, it was a real-life “emergency” during the flight. Again, I don’t like to use the word emergency because there was never really any danger — unless, of course, the engine-driven fuel pump went bad, too. Then we’d have a problem.

Postscript

I flew back from Scottsdale with no further fuel pump problems.

The next day, I did a 50-minute scenic flight with two passengers on board. We were about 45 minutes into the flight — less than 5 miles from the airport — when the darn light came back on. I finished the tour — which was basically on the way to the airport anyway — and landed. When I pushed in the circuit breaker, it popped right out again.

When my passengers were on their way, I visited Ed, my local mechanic. I asked him to take a look at the pump when he had a chance, then put the helicopter away in my hangar, which is just down the row from his. He called with the bad news a while later. The pump was seized. I’d have to get a new one. I called the factory at 2:30 PM (their time) and managed to get it on a UPS truck for overnight (Saturday) delivery to Wickenburg. With luck, it’ll arrive as planned (Saturday deliver is a very iffy thing in Wickenburg) and Ed will put it in. I’ll be flying again on Sunday.

Unfortunately, it’ll take the flights I have scheduled on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday just to pay for the new pump.

The Who, In Concert

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Not too old to rock and roll.

Mike and I were lucky enough to have seats on the floor at Wednesday night’s Who concert at US Airways Center (formerly America West Arena) in downtown Phoenix. It was an amazing experience.

First of all, the last time we saw The Who, John Entwistle was still alive. We saw the concert at Shea Stadium (I think; you’d think I’d remember something like that), which is a huge venue. Most of the rock concerts I’ve been to have been in big venues: Madison Square Garden (where I always managed to be in the Yellow “nose-bleed” section) for Elton John and led Zeppelin (in the 1970s) , Nassau Coliseum (for Styx and Yes), Shea Stadium (for the Rolling Stones, The Who, and Elton John and Eric Clapton (together, in the 1990s)), and Giants Stadium (for Pink Floyd, Division Bell tour, 1990s). US Airways Center is smaller than Nassau Coliseum (I think), so seeing these legends of rock and roll in such a “tiny” place was a real treat.

Second of all, I was among the youngest people in the place. The average age of concert-goers was approaching 50. Lots of balding heads and beer bellies and overweight women. Mike and I fit right in. There were exceptions, of course. One guy apparently had his son (or perhaps grandson?) with him. And there were a half dozen geeky 20-year-olds who became somewhat of an annoyance by bouncing along with the music past the floor sections, only to be pushed back repeatedly by security. (I would have kicked them out after the second incursion.)

Our seats were 20-30 rows back from the stage. Very nice seats. There was an aisle in front of the row in front of us, so it wasn’t as if we had to look over a sea of heads. Mike did good.

We arrived just in time for the opening act, The Tragically Hip. I can understand how the word “tragic” got into this band’s name. It was a tragedy for us to arrive in time to hear them. It was also a tragedy that they played 5 or 6 songs, all of which sounded pretty much the same to me. And the lyrics:

You’re not the ocean.

You’re not even close.

Huh?

The lead singer had some kind of weird dance move that isn’t exactly original — Cab Calloway was doing the same thing back in the 1930s a hell of a lot better. And I guess he didn’t understand that the thing he was shouting into was a live microphone, because he found it necessary to scream most of the lyrics.

You’re not the ocean.

You’re not even close.

Yeah. Whatever.

The Tragically Hip exited the stage amidst applause. The roadies came out and started working on the stage. The people who had been watching the opening act, went out to get beer and nachos. (Yes, nachos; very strange for an east coast girl.) The smart people who knew that the opening act would suck started filing in. The place filled up. They were playing recorded music over the loudspeakers. They were in the middle of Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks when the music died out, the hall went dark, and Daltrey and Townshend took the stage with their band (drummer Zak Starkey, keyboardist John Bundrick, guitarist Simon Townshend, and bassist Pino Palladrino).

Endless WireEveryone was immediately on their feet. And we stayed there for the next two hours, sitting only when the band played a track from their new CD. We were all there to hear the old stuff and they didn’t disappoint.

They opened with I Can’t Explain. And for guys in their 60s, they looked pretty damn good. Daltrey is in excellent shape — he looks like he works out. Even Townshend, who never stuck me as the kind of guy overly interested in appearance, looked good. The show was great, full of energy and the “trademarked” moves Who fans have come to expect: Daltrey’s swinging of the mike (he’s probably the only performer who still needs a mike with a wire) and Townshend’s “windmill.”

The concert lasted about two hours, including a 20-minute encore. They played Teenage Wasteland, Pinball Wizard (leading off a Tommy medley), My Generation, Behind Blue Eyes, and more than my addled brain can remember. (If you were at the concert, please use the Comments link to fill in my memory gaps. You can also read a review here.)

The show was great and kept my attention for the entire time — which is something unusual (I think I suffer from ADD symptoms sometimes). I was energized, dancing and singing at the top of my lungs. (Don’t worry; no one heard me above the sound of the band.)

But the thing I came away with from the experience is this: I’m not too old to rock and roll — and neither are the two surviving members of The Who.

Using Google AdSense Channels

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Article now available on Informit.com.

My latest Informit.com article, “Using Google AdSense Channels” is now online.

From the article’s intro (written by editors, not me):

Google’s AdSense program is a very popular advertising option for blogs and web sites because it’s easy to use and can generate revenue with minimal effort. Maria Langer explains how to use the Channels features in AdSense to track which of your ads are earning the most revenue.

This article should be of special interest to bloggers and traditional Web site webmasters who try to raise revenue using the Google AdSense products.

There are two other Informit articles in the pipeline. Keep checking in; I’ll let you know when they’re released. Or check my Informit.com books and articles page for yourself to see what’s new.

Too Busy to Blog!

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I’m back (kinda) and will be blogging again shortly.

Just a quick note to let readers know that I’ve been completely tied up (figuratively; don’t get any kinky ideas) for the past three days. I spent the time in the Phoenix area, taking care of some helicopter training issues, a bum aviation radio, a Who concert (really!), and a Part 135 check ride.

I’m back this morning and have a whole long list of things to blog about. Unfortunately, I still have a few things to do — mainly two helicopter flights and the completion of Chapter 7 of my Excel 2007 book — before I can get back to adding content to this site.

So bear with me; I’ll be back soon.