1 - DL 1 - Crash!

R. A., I want to apologise about something. Being my little brother, and still ostensibly a baby in my eyes, it means that I don’t always take you seriously. It happened when you had your first kiss, when you got your first job, and it happened last weekend when you called me frantically about your hard-drive-explosion-all-over-your-face-event. Well not exactly that, but there was a crash somewhere in there. Like anything else that happens to you, I shrugged it off as bad luck, and didn’t think for a second to take steps to prevent it myself. Well, I’m sorry I did that. I realize now that you are a grown up, capable of making informed observations and decisions, and of experiencing real life problems that are applicable to myself. I realized this because, I too, have just had a hard-drive-explosion-all-over-your-face-event, though this particular time it was all over my face.

Well, much like yourself, baby brother, I did very little in the way of backing up. So we are now two people considerably further up that particular creek you don’t want to be on, especially without a paddle. Well, paddles in this case would be external hard drives, and our arms would be used to back up our data, and so safely row away without having lost all of your life’s work that you created in this particular canoe… well, this particular computer anyway. Since we’re both writers, and printing everything out is expensive and bad for the environment, I’m pretty sure every movie script, television pilot, script writing breakdown and elaborate budget I’ve ever written is now nothing but a memory, along with every book, plot synopsis, character description and pitch you’d ever written. Luckily, two positive things have come out of this. One is that I now see that you are, in fact, not an infant anymore. Also, that losing all your writing really sucks.

Since you write novels, and that racks up a considerably higher word count than screenplays do, I can only imagine the pain your are still under. The other positive result of this tragedy is this:____ Yes, this blog. Since a lot of both of our work is gone, I thought we could have a combined restarting of our hobbies with this blog. I know it’s not a glamorous as an actual novel, or as sexy as a screenplay, but it’ll be a great way for us to get our fingers going again, and maybe lead to some great ideas for our work. After all, if losing everything isn’t a great reason to replace it with even better stuff, then I don’t know what is. Except maybe being paid for it. I figure it could work quite simply, I’ll pick a day of the week, and you pick a different day, and we post our blog entries. Just keeping people up to date with how our writing is going, and the funniest parts of our weeks. With a little luck, maybe Andrew will also get in on this, though he’ll take convincing because, of course, being the older brother, he doesn’t usually take either of us seriously. We’ll be the Lyons Brother, Writing From Square One. Hopefully, I’ll hear from you soon.

Daniel Lyons.