John Clark sharing what happened a while back and how it’s currently shaking out. Several months ago, Beth’s laptop which she’d just upgraded to the latest version of Windows, locked her out. Since she’d had it since we lived in Hartland and hadn’t thought about updating verification, she was effectively screwed.

I thought to try creating a boot disk on a flash drive, so I proceeded to erase data on one, only to discover shortly after that instead of clearing duplicate files from a thumb drive, I’d wiped out everything on my 4 terabyte backup drive. That included everything I’d ever written.

Once I realized what happened, I went and laid on the bed, giving serious thought to getting drunk for the first time in almost 43 years. Instead, I did some breathing exercises, returned to my laptop and started looking for a recovery program. I found one and had to wait more than 24 hours for it to drill down and recover most everything. It was well worth the $132 it cost.

That was just the beginning because I had to open every single recovered file and if I wanted to keep it, it had to be renamed. That took another several weeks, but it was a learning experience. In the interim, my friend Clif Graves worked with me to create a linux boot disk that allowed us to bypass Beth’s locked laptop and recover all her photos and documents. She now has not only a new laptop, but her own one terabyte SSD drive to save stuff on.

When the dust settled, I got busy, starting by going back to Thor’s Wingman a book I stopped writing in 2017. It’s now finished and when I was done, I started thinking about crafting another anthology of my adult short fiction. Learning about the big author event in December at the Bangor Public Library was the last bit of impetus I needed. By Friday, it should be ready to send to Clif who will prep it for publication in print and ebook. It’s going to be called Dark Maine.

When I started putting all my adult short stories in a folder to decide which to use in Dark Maine, I realized one reason I’d been stymied when trying to put a collection together in the past was twofold. They were saved in different formats and I needed to remove footers in order for them to play nice. Once that was taken care of, I started selecting which to use. The anthology will have 21 stories in it. Twenty are dark as hell, the other I slipped in as a feel-good breather.

There are plenty left to go into what I’ll call Sometimes Dark, Sometimes Light, Always Maine. Time and circumstances permitting, I’ll have that put together in a timely manner.

Here’s the lineup for Dark Maine.

In Your Dreams

Posh Digs

With Great Relish

Bad Example

Lady Be Good to Me

Living Up To My Name

Tower Mountain

Fed Up

Knee Socks

In A Town Most Forgotten

Dead Letter Office

My Toes

Love Your Veggies

Martin Gets It

The Unexpected Gift

Snuff Bunny

A New Wrinkle

Not So Neighborly

The Smell Never Leaves

Just Passing Through

The Man In The Glass

Schoolyard Bullies

Perfect Choice

Getting Even

Backup Plan

And here’s the tentative cover photo.