Always Have A Backup

When I briefly thought my book might be lost...

As of this week, I’m a little over 83,000 words into my upcoming book, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor. I have the bulk of my research materials close at hand (though new and interesting things pop up all the time, and small revelations spark little journalistic side-quests, as always) and I know what I have left to write about. My guess is that the final manuscript will be somewhere between 100 and 120,000 words, including bibliography, discography, notes, etc. (but not including the index).

But on Saturday night, I had a moment of stark terror. I wanted to punch in some quotes from producer John Snyder, whom I had interviewed earlier that day about three projects he worked on with Taylor: the 1990 album In Florescence, the 1999 album Momentum Space (actually a Dewey Redman record, with Taylor and Elvin Jones as sidemen), and a 2008 “Master Class” DVD. He had some excellent and interesting stories about all three.

But when I tried to launch Scrivener, the program I use for book-length projects, it wouldn’t load. It just sat there frozen, or showing me the spinning beach ball of death, until I hit “Force Quit.” This happened three times in a row, and frankly, I was starting to panic. Finally, I arrived at a stopgap solution: I emailed the Scrivener file of In the Brewing Luminous to myself, installed the program on the other computer in the house, and opened it there. I also exported the chapter text to a Word document, so I have a crude backup of at least that much of the project (though a lot of my notes, interview transcripts, etc. would be lost in that case).

As of Sunday morning, Scrivener is working perfectly on my laptop; it’s as though nothing ever happened, and the book remains more or less on schedule. But that was an extremely scary night. Anyway, below the paywall is a section of my interview with John Snyder, dealing with the Momentum Space project.

[A note, to explain the last paragraph of the story below: Momentum Space only features two pieces on which all three musicians play together — “Nine” and “Is.” “Bekei” is a drum solo; “Life As” is a piano solo; “Dew” is a saxophone solo; “Spoonin’” is a sax/drums duo; and “It” is a piano/drums duo.]