Scott Franz Books

I always used to wonder about authors telling stories of how it took ten, fifteen, or even more years to complete a novel. Until I became one of those authors.

I wrote Patriots of the Kings Table, and finished it in 2008. I guess technically it wasn’t finished as I did plan on a revision or two but for all practical purposes it was complete. It had a beginning, middle and ending and all it needed was a tweak or two.

Then the worst possible thing in the world happened.  I had a hard drive crash on my computer. I didn’t realize that I had an expired credit card on file for my cloud backup and I found myself just crushed losing my entire work.

I was not in a great place at the time and the cost of trying to have the hard drive recovered was not something I could easily deal with at the time. So there it sat.

Finally several years later, my medical condition better and working again, I sent off the hard drive to a recovery lab and waited anxiously for my entire work to be returned to me.

As I turned out, not all of the work could be recovered and many of the chapters that were recovered had a lot of gibberish embedded in the work.  I was crushed again as my expectations were that I’d get my entire completed manuscript returned to me, make the few revisions and publish the work.

I don’t know how it is for all authors, but once I have a completed work, I find it extremely difficult to go back and rewrite something I’d already written.  And so it sat. My partial novel on paper. Ten or more chapters missing. The entire story still in my head. It sat and it sat just waiting for me to get back to it and get it done.

Then came August 7, 2023.

………To be continued