Member-only story
WRITING
Don’t Lose Your Precious and Irreplaceable Dingbat Bolts Like I did
I thought they were safe, but they were not!
These are my ding-bat bolts, or at least one style. These bolts were slightly curved and deliberately made to cross-thread instantly. I offered them for sale in a story I wrote many years ago.
As you might expect, sales were dismal, but as most readers assumed that my fledgling internet business was a humor piece, I did make some money from the effort.
The story and all of its images but one are lost. Vanished, seemingly without a trace. None of it is in my backups, none of it is in the Internet Archives, I have no hard copies, no PDFs, nada.
Deep Backup
This is deeply frustrating because I do make and keep deep backups. Deep, deep, and deeper! I have access to Internet stories I wrote as early as 1994. Many are from writing sites long since defunct, but I have my stories! I have them, dammit!
But I do not have my Dingbat Bolts or its drawings. I have only the single image you see above. I recall that I also drew an image of a specialized bolt shaped like part of an Escher cube; I could recreate it, but I’m aggravated because I should have it.
