Greetings, awesome humans (and robots)!
Today’s story is not a story. Well, it’s not a fiction story. It’s a memoir of a pretty major data loss I dealt with in June. June 2026 was a month. Duh. Of course it was a month. What else would June be? But it Was. A. Month.
This will make sense, I promise.
But before I get into all that… I need to do my usual plug for all the books and stories I have out there, but with a promo code at the end:
Links: Lunar Logic | Robot Galaxy Series | Final Orbit | Objective Reality
…and the new books:
Links: T is for Time Travel | Annotated Robot Galaxy Series #CC3333 or #00B3B3
With the 4th of July holiday coming up, I’m on the bandwagon of sales and stuff. It’s the US of A’s 250th Anniversary! Also known as the “semiquincentennial.” Because I’m a number nerd, and because I can’t just offer a 250% discount, I had to come up with something else.
I like square roots! Especially irrational ones which the square root of 250 is. Specifically it’s: 15.81138832…
…but Shopify only let’s me use whole numbers for discounts so I had to round it to 16.
This is a VERY LONG AND NERDY way of saying: Use this code: SQRT250 to get 16% off your total order for anything you purchase from my shopify store.
…and because I REALLY want to sell books and you should absolutely get my whole collection and give copies to your friends… If your order is more than $63, use this code to take 30% off the entire order! Code: 4XSQRT250
(63? Huh? 63 = 4 x SQRT of 250. Why 4? For 4th of July! lol)
Both of these codes will be active through the end of the day Tuesday, July 7th (midnight ET).
Remember… these codes are valid on my direct store:
https://crazyrobot.myshopify.com/
We make strong associations with smells and colors whenever anything extreme happens. I now associate the color yellow with data loss and the heartache associated with hard work and wasted effort.
Why yellow?
That was the mug sitting on my desk between me and my computer monitor the moment I realized what had happened… the moment I knew my data was GONE.
What data?
My Robot Galaxy Series bible and the bible I had begun as I started to turn Lunar Logic into a series.
Many of you, especially my fellow authors, probably instantly understand and recognize the scope of what I mean when I say: I lost my series bible. Unrecoverable.
For everyone else… lemme try and explain. When I started writing Crazy Foolish Robots, I had to keep track of all the world-building details. People, places, things I invented. The timeline. For me, this started out as a mind-map. (I still have an old image of it:
…and as I went on, it got to be too much for this format. I love mind-maps, but this one was too big. I needed another and better way to keep track of everything. A lot of that “everything” included links to sources and research of what I based my ideas on.
I found my way to a tool called Confluence. If you’re familiar with a “wiki”… Confluence is just a tool to create a wiki. It’s one I lovingly use at work and have been a strong enthusiast for the tool for many years already. The company that makes it, Atlassian, offers a free-tier for their hosted tool. So, a few years ago I signed up, and continued to build out not only the bible for The Robot Galaxy Series there, but also the bible I’d started for Lunar Logic since I’m a large chunk of the way through a sequel to that.
But, I’m busy. Y’all know that.
So it’s not like I need to access Confluence on the daily. Or even weekly. Even if I’m actively working on a book, which I have been (T is for Tangent… the next book in the T-Set after T is for Time Travel), I don’t necessarily need to access it. I just need to know it’s safely there when I need it.
The last time I needed it was April 1st, 2026.
Whelp, on June 17th… I still didn’t need it. But I was going through my email. I am always behind on email. I am always looking for ways to improve how I handle my email (that is another story and problem for another day, although for reasons… I’ve already made improvements since the 17th).
There was an email from Atlassian that arrived on May 17th buried as one of a bunch of emails that said “Important” in the subject line. I swear, every email says “Important.” So I didn’t think about it or even read the contents. But it did make me think about my bible and I wanted to look something up.
…and I couldn’t access it. I was confused and went back to the email. It said that after 45 days of inactivity, my account would be deactivated and my data would be permanently deleted “soon.” No specific date. Just “soon.” Not a single email after that warning me of my data deletion. Nothing.
“Soon” turned out to be May 31st. I spent a panicked evening and following day trying to get hold of someone at Atlassian to see if my data was really gone or if there was a rolling backup that existed etc…. I’ll end this part of the story here: My data is gone.
(Here’s one of my LinkedIn posts on the topic: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7473500281541046273/ )
I’ve gone through the 5 stages of grief and have arrived at acceptance and am rebuilding.
The concepts that have been swirling in my head ever since… the fact that one of my jobs… in addition to my day job, my writing job, my book publishing job (those last two are of course related and the two primary hats of being an Indie Author)… is that of Data Librarian.
Or content manager. Knowledge manager? Information Architect? Data Curator?
Yeah, that last one I like a lot.
Point is… I have a lot of digital data and the on-going “maintenance” and curation of that is a… challenge.
As someone who got into the digital universe very early, I’ve been hoarding digital data for decades and am always wondering about better ways to manage is it so it isn’t just a hoard. I want it… no, I NEED it… to be useful to me.
Loosing my bibles I think was kick in the butt I needed to get my digital life in order. I’m not 100% there, but close.
I wanted this ‘memoir’ to be more about being that Data Librarian, but instead you got the story of my data loss. And I’m going to end it here, and just jump into some geeky things.
If you’re not into computers or this stuff, please skip down a little bit until the next section and continue. 😊
For everyone else, who are computer geeky types like me, here are the things to know:
I’m now all in on Obsidian. I’d been a casual user in the past (and started using it at my dayjob since they FINALLY approved it for use), but because I was an Evernote paid subscriber for the last 20yrs… a happy one… I couldn’t make the full switch. But when Evernote jacked up their price A LOT this spring, I migrated to Notesnook and was never as happy… (and ALMOST experienced ANOTHER data loss with them! Which would have been worse. A lot worse.)
Local and private AI. Separately, I’d started to migrate to using LM Studio — so I can run LLMs locally on my computer. I mostly wanted to do this so I could have it act as a better search engine/curator of all the stuff on my own machine. Well, this event pushed me to get it all working. No, I still don’t/won’t use it to write, but there are so many other interesting things one can do, especially with “curating” one’s own stuff.
I could yammer on about all this more… but I’m going to stop here and say: does anyone have any questions?? Especially technical ones!
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading about my minor tragedy… I’ll be back with the flash fiction (that was already on my mind) next month.
I’ve shelved the yellow mug for a while. I have a red one now. Red is supposed to bring good luck, right?
But keep on reading… there’s more here to include stuff from other Indie Authors, recent BIG Sci-Fi Podcast episode links, and of course my bonus picture!
Instead of my usual poll asking what you thought of the flash fiction story, I have one that will help me on the business end of being an Indie Author. It’s about the Annotated Robot Galaxy Series…
These books (same book, available in 2 colors… the #CC3333 Edition and the #00B3B3 Edition), are all 4 of the Robot Galaxy Series put together, but then throughout has all these footnotes/annotations that give behind the scenes details on the series.
Up until now, I’ve only offered it as a paperback (it was part of my Kickstarter). I’m considering offering it as an ebook as well.
Does that sound interesting?
As always, with this newsletter you can:
And of course, subscribe so you get notified when I post new stories/newsletters!
Indie authors are here to help out other indie authors. This simply means we cross-promote in each other’s newsletters in the hope that we’ll find readers for each other!
Check out this hard Sci-Fi Technothriller about AGI Ethics, Neural Interfacing, and the birth of Diana. NEXUS-9: The Icarus Protocol by Janus Whitmore is a free, downloadable NEXUS-9 prequel.
And of course we do group promos where you can check out a whole bunch of writings from authors you don’t yet know! (Once again, I’m responsible for the first one!)
Over at The BIG Sci-Fi podcast, we closed out Season 10! (10!?!?! Yes—we’ve been doing this for a while now!) And then we met up at Trek Long Island which is the one place the four of us gather each year. So listen to the end of Season 10! I’m especially proud of our second interview with Rod Roddenberry. Yes, he’s the son of Gene Roddenberry but he’s ALSO the son of Majel Barret Roddenberry and this time we spent a whole lot of time talking about one of the — IMHO — still very much unsung and underrated heroes of Trek! (You can also listen to them over on Spotify or wherever you like to listen to podcasts!)
We’re on our in-between season break… which is an EXCELLENT time to catch up on past episodes. Some of my past faves?
The one where we interviewed John Scalzi. (and Part 2 of that interview)
The one where we interviewed Andy Weir.
The one where we interviewed Hugh Howey.
Okay… and as I was scrolling through our old episodes (there are like 200 of them) I had 30 or 40 more faves and they can’t all be… right? But one more I had to add to the list… the time when my co-hosts interviewed ME!
In case you haven’t checked out the podcast yet… we cover anything/all things sci-fi. We’re very Star Trek heavy, but not Trek exclusive. We do a lot of interviews, but also not exclusively. Sometimes we just talk about a fave TV show or movie. And our interviews cover on-screen actors, behind-the-scenes writers, producers, musicians, prop makers, sci-fi authors, and more. Oh yeah, there was that time we had an astronaut on (Rick Mastracchio… and then he came back and talked to us again about his time as a consultant on the movie Spaceman)!
I am continuing to re-build enough of my worldbuilding to be able to finish T is for Tangent. That’s of course the priority here.
And in a little over a week is Shore Leave.
Which brings me to my bonus picture. This is not the picture I planned. I had planned to share a collage of images from Trek Long Island.
The person holding the mic is Dr. Inge Heyer. This was Sunday morning, the first panel of the day on the main stage. Every year we’ve done an “Ask Me Anything” type panel with all the STEM folks at the convention. That’s me standing on the right holding some papers out in my hand.
I’m sharing this pic because this is/was the last time I will have had a panel with Inge. She passed away very unexpectedly two weeks later. Inge was an astronomy professor at Loyola, co-chair of the Shore Leave convention, and the person who got me started doing science talks at conventions like these.
For anyone going to Shore Leave this year… I’ll be there again (doing panels and a science talk “AI in Space” on Sunday evening). And there will be a memorial service for Inge Sunday morning.
Like I said when I started the newsletter today… June 2026 was a month. So much has changed (yeah, there are even a few things I didn’t even cover in this newsletter. They’ll have to wait). Big things.
Until next month… be good, be kind, be well!
-Adeena
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