Is It Ever Too Late Too Pick Up Where You Left Off?

[SlickTony]

You probably don't remember me, but I used to hang out here quite a lot. But then a series of things happened: I hit menopause and my pilot light went out, and I was into doing music a lot, but then the open mics in my town went through a real drought, and then 2016 happened, and we all know what happened then, and then I was retired from a job I'd had 18 1/2 years. Finding work on line hasn't quite worked out the way I'd hoped. Worse, my work--my writing work--disappeared. I mean, I had all 16 of my stories disappear from my H drive, and a bunch of material pertaining to the characters featured in the stories, plus part of a novel I'd been working out dealing with the same. I even had the Geek Squad try and recover the data on the H drive. So my body of work here is all I've got left, and I'm surely thankful because I couldn't have recreated it from scratch. And I had hell and all trying to find this place. Is Literotica a part of some larger thing? It seems to be. For a while I even wondered if I could resume writing under my original name here, but hell, if I can post...

I haven't done much writing except a LOT of Facebooking and Twittering, and I'd like to get back to it. I'd like to get paid on occasion, but as I remember, it never starts that way. I wonder if anyone else has had this happen to them.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Quite the tale, but permit me to be the first to say welcome back.

And, no, it’s never too late.

 

[Euphony]

I'd like to get back to it.

The want is the marker for whether you should/shouldn't get back into it. If you feel you want to, you absolutely should, regardless of outside factors or other's experiences.

I'd like to get paid on occasion, but as I remember, it never starts that way.

I would place that reward in the further recesses of your mind. Not to say you don't/won't have an ability to turn it into something monetary, the chasing of such is a quick way to ruining the work before you really get started.

Those who do make money here had their craft ducks in a row long before they set out into the marketplace. Putting some smeckles in the pocket isn't the long term craft motivation many believe it to me.

I wonder if anyone else has had this happen to them.

Probabilities suggest of course. But what is critical is not others, but yourself.

Do you have a genuine urge to write again? Is there a curiosity to explore themes, word craft, create something (ostensibly to publish for an audience as you are here?)

If the answer is even leaning "yes," you need to write even if no soul has ever had your experience (unlikely) or even if it doesn't make logical sense to try.

The want IS VITAL to the craft. If it's important to you, wall it off from outside criticism or even need for support as best as you can.

It is your ember to tend almost completely solely if you want to make fire.

 

[SlickTony]

Thanks for your reply. It's given me a lot to think about. Right now the stuff I do write in other platforms leans toward the op-ed area. I started on something that I think is very important and needs to be widely discussed, but found, or recalled, how dang much research has to get involved. A lot of political writing I've seen seems to contain more op than ed.

 

[Euphony]

Thanks for your reply. It's given me a lot to think about. Right now the stuff I do write in other platforms leans toward the op-ed area. I started on something that I think is very important and needs to be widely discussed, but found, or recalled, how dang much research has to get involved. A lot of political writing I've seen seems to contain more op than ed.

It is good you have a bit of finger muscle memory to lean on. It helps.

Please don't let my following statement dissuade you, but stop thinking. Rather, thinking is more the antithesis of what you are working towards right now, which is words on paper/screen etc.

Op ed style writing also leans heavily towards the consideration/thinking space which may be another small hurdle for you to overcome.

Write something in the vein of what you feel you want to write. Don't strive to be at the quality you want to write or even quality at all, just go through the process of writing down thoughts to paper. Rare is the person who overwrites and under edits. Most of us abridge ourselves a little too hard if anything.

Fire up an app, phone, word processor, whatever, and write anything until you reacquaint yourself with the process of writing just to be writing. That will lead you to the editing, crafting, narrative, and character spaces (later on.) And has the lovely benefit of reinforcing your want to write (and write more.)

Shitty first drafts are beautiful things too many don't appreciate for their importance.

Write nonsense. Write a lot of it. It's a big first step towards writing what we all envision we want to write.

 

[Jmanchu]

You probably don't remember me, but I used to hang out here quite a lot. But then a series of things happened: I hit menopause and my pilot light went out, and I was into doing music a lot, but then the open mics in my town went through a real drought, and then 2016 happened, and we all know what happened then, and then I was retired from a job I'd had 18 1/2 years. Finding work on line hasn't quite worked out the way I'd hoped. Worse, my work--my writing work--disappeared. I mean, I had all 16 of my stories disappear from my H drive, and a bunch of material pertaining to the characters featured in the stories, plus part of a novel I'd been working out dealing with the same. I even had the Geek Squad try and recover the data on the H drive. So my body of work here is all I've got left, and I'm surely thankful because I couldn't have recreated it from scratch. And I had hell and all trying to find this place. Is Literotica a part of some larger thing? It seems to be. For a while I even wondered if I could resume writing under my original name here, but hell, if I can post...

I haven't done much writing except a LOT of Facebooking and Twittering, and I'd like to get back to it. I'd like to get paid on occasion, but as I remember, it never starts that way. I wonder if anyone else has had this happen to them.

I've lost hard drives of stories, and sometimes I've had long breaks. I've even had a lot of progress in stories be lost because of hardware issues and the frustration made me take a break before I jumped in and tried again. I have some stories that I'm working on right now that I had the idea for 10+ years, or have only written the first chapter before I jumped back in again. The one story chapter I have published here I wrote the first half almost 13 years ago before I wrote the other half about a year ago and had it put through an editor/writer here to clean it up. She fixed grammar issues, and really updated the prose and vocabulary with her writing and get it ready for publishing. Which was a good learning experience for my own writing(Shout out to Winter_Fare, great writer with interesting stories. Really, thank you for being patient throughout the process and helping me with publishing my first story here. I mean it. ). And this was after years of no writing at all. It was awkward at first to use those rusty writing muscles again, but I'm back at it and I have probably about 2 or 3 stories that are almost ready to be published or edited.

What I'm saying is, it's never too late. You got this.

 

[ElectricBlue]

You've got stories begging to be written? Write them, don't write about maybe writing them, or may be not writing them, or whatever the fuck happened to your life. Sympathy and all that, but not holding hands here. Just get on with the new stuff, forget about the old stuff. I sound like Pete Townshend!

 

[gunhilltrain]

You probably don't remember me, but I used to hang out here quite a lot. But then a series of things happened: I hit menopause and my pilot light went out, and I was into doing music a lot, but then the open mics in my town went through a real drought, and then 2016 happened, and we all know what happened then, and then I was retired from a job I'd had 18 1/2 years. Finding work on line hasn't quite worked out the way I'd hoped. Worse, my work--my writing work--disappeared. I mean, I had all 16 of my stories disappear from my H drive, and a bunch of material pertaining to the characters featured in the stories, plus part of a novel I'd been working out dealing with the same. I even had the Geek Squad try and recover the data on the H drive. So my body of work here is all I've got left, and I'm surely thankful because I couldn't have recreated it from scratch. And I had hell and all trying to find this place. Is Literotica a part of some larger thing? It seems to be. For a while I even wondered if I could resume writing under my original name here, but hell, if I can post...

I haven't done much writing except a LOT of Facebooking and Twittering, and I'd like to get back to it. I'd like to get paid on occasion, but as I remember, it never starts that way. I wonder if anyone else has had this happen to them.

Always back up your work. Even a thumb drive/memory stick is better than nothing. If you can afford it, get one of those "cloud" deals where you can store data outside of your own home. (It could burn down or be flooded, and then everything would go. It happens quite often.) I think the deals are pretty reasonable; I haven't priced one recently.

 

[NoTalentHack]

You probably don't remember me, but I used to hang out here quite a lot. But then a series of things happened: I hit menopause and my pilot light went out, and I was into doing music a lot, but then the open mics in my town went through a real drought, and then 2016 happened, and we all know what happened then, and then I was retired from a job I'd had 18 1/2 years. Finding work on line hasn't quite worked out the way I'd hoped. Worse, my work--my writing work--disappeared. I mean, I had all 16 of my stories disappear from my H drive, and a bunch of material pertaining to the characters featured in the stories, plus part of a novel I'd been working out dealing with the same. I even had the Geek Squad try and recover the data on the H drive. So my body of work here is all I've got left, and I'm surely thankful because I couldn't have recreated it from scratch. And I had hell and all trying to find this place. Is Literotica a part of some larger thing? It seems to be. For a while I even wondered if I could resume writing under my original name here, but hell, if I can post...

I haven't done much writing except a LOT of Facebooking and Twittering, and I'd like to get back to it. I'd like to get paid on occasion, but as I remember, it never starts that way. I wonder if anyone else has had this happen to them.

It's never too late, if it's what you want to do and have free space in your schedule. Those are the important parts, the will and the time to do it.

I hadn't written anything other than character backstories or other RPG/gamin-related stuff for personal use since the 90s in college. And then, I just suddenly got bit by the bug to start up again. It's been six months, and I've released 28 works here on Literotica, with another in the queue for publication and about a dozen more stories in a partially completed state. I'm looking at publishing on Smashwords and Amazon as well, because unlike in the 90s, there are commercial outlets that want short story and novella-length works and can connect me to readers that will pay for them.

I know of at least one author on here who wrote in 2006, stopped, and resumed 15 years later; she's very happy to be back, and we correspond regularly. If it's what you want to do, do it!

Lastly, from a technical/logistical standpoint, I suggest looking into Google Docs as a writing platform. It's not as full-featured as modern versions of Word or some of the other options, but all of your content is up in the cloud; no chance of a hard drive crash wiping it out. I do, on occasion, convert all of my stuff to Word documents and put it on thumb drives, but that's probably just me being paranoid from all the years I've worked in IT.

Welcome back! And I hope to see your name in the New lists soon.

 

[ronde]

You probably don't remember me, but I used to hang out here quite a lot. But then a series of things happened: I hit menopause and my pilot light went out, and I was into doing music a lot, but then the open mics in my town went through a real drought, and then 2016 happened, and we all know what happened then, and then I was retired from a job I'd had 18 1/2 years. Finding work on line hasn't quite worked out the way I'd hoped. Worse, my work--my writing work--disappeared. I mean, I had all 16 of my stories disappear from my H drive, and a bunch of material pertaining to the characters featured in the stories, plus part of a novel I'd been working out dealing with the same. I even had the Geek Squad try and recover the data on the H drive. So my body of work here is all I've got left, and I'm surely thankful because I couldn't have recreated it from scratch. And I had hell and all trying to find this place. Is Literotica a part of some larger thing? It seems to be. For a while I even wondered if I could resume writing under my original name here, but hell, if I can post...

I haven't done much writing except a LOT of Facebooking and Twittering, and I'd like to get back to it. I'd like to get paid on occasion, but as I remember, it never starts that way. I wonder if anyone else has had this happen to them.

I learned the hard way to always have at least two copies of everything you write on different devices. I currently back up about once a month to a second hard drive.

As far as the question about if you should start writing again, being of the more experienced generation here I can say that if you want to and don't, you'll always regret the decision.

 

[ColinPiper]

Welcome back. I'm new here, but enjoying the number of readers my stories are exposed to compared to a previous site I frequented. I think readers/feedback helps with wanting to improve. (If my calcs are correct, I get and average one comment per 3 to 4 thousand views - sheesh.)

Easy to say after the horse has gotten out and eaten your children, but I second the "take backups" recommendation - even if it is as simple as copying to a thumb drive with a datestamp in the file/folder name.

It's also a somewhat strange time of my life given I've worked in tech for 30+ years and the work has dried up, and the spark has gone TBH. I'm much more interested in writing, and I may have to make the decision to go full time study for a couple of years, which would involve major scary changes to my life situation. But enough about me, I'm looking forward to reading your stuff.

 

[KeithD]

I do remember you (from your photo). I don't think it's ever too late to start writing again. I do think it can be too late to pick up again on posting a series that's gone several months without feeding.

 

[Djmac1031]

Just wanna say welcome. And no, never too late.

Hopefully you cam find your groove to write again.

 

[TxRad]

Hey Tony, welcome back.

If putting men on pause has thrown things off, then check out the non-erotic category. Some fine writers and stories there.

Find a character or two, toss them out on the table and see what they do and how they interact. You now have the start of a story. Follow it.

I had a laptop stolen with all my writing on it. Luckily I had backed all my work up on a thumb drive except the latest novel I was working on.

Just do it, as the saying goes.

 

[Seadog777]

You probably don't remember me, but I used to hang out here quite a lot. But then a series of things happened: I hit menopause and my pilot light went out, and I was into doing music a lot, but then the open mics in my town went through a real drought, and then 2016 happened, and we all know what happened then, and then I was retired from a job I'd had 18 1/2 years. Finding work on line hasn't quite worked out the way I'd hoped. Worse, my work--my writing work--disappeared. I mean, I had all 16 of my stories disappear from my H drive, and a bunch of material pertaining to the characters featured in the stories, plus part of a novel I'd been working out dealing with the same. I even had the Geek Squad try and recover the data on the H drive. So my body of work here is all I've got left, and I'm surely thankful because I couldn't have recreated it from scratch. And I had hell and all trying to find this place. Is Literotica a part of some larger thing? It seems to be. For a while I even wondered if I could resume writing under my original name here, but hell, if I can post...

I haven't done much writing except a LOT of Facebooking and Twittering, and I'd like to get back to it. I'd like to get paid on occasion, but as I remember, it never starts that way. I wonder if anyone else has had this happen to them.

First of all, welcome back.

Second, I don't think it's ever "too late" when it comes to writing.
You might have to reread some of your works and then come up with some new stuff, but never too late.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

Only if you’re no longer here. Then it’s too late. As long as your mind works and you’ve got a story to tell and the ability to tell it then no, it’s not too late. Go for it. The worst anyone can do is vote you down and put a mean comment, but we are always here for tea and sympathy.

 

[tenyari]

Is Literotica a part of some larger thing? It seems to be. For a while I even wondered if I could resume writing under my original name here, but hell, if I can post...

I haven't done much writing except a LOT of Facebooking and Twittering, and I'd like to get back to it. I'd like to get paid on occasion, but as I remember, it never starts that way. I wonder if anyone else has had this happen to them.

Look at the gap in years between my recent stories and the ones before them. I too took a rather long break before getting back into this.

One bit of side advice: make a google handle unique to your erotica and keep a backup of your work online on google drive. My computer and hard drives could vanish but my stories would not.