Stranger Than Fiction: Man Sprints Into Burning Home to Rescue Laptop With Novel on It

Gideon Hodge, a published novelist in New Orleans, didn't back up his book prior to the blaze.

It was a real life plot twist as a man put his life on the line as he ran back into his burning home to retrieve a laptop containing the book he has been writing.

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Author Gideon Hodge, 35, hadn't backed up his manuscript. If the computer had gone up in flames, so would his book and two years of hard work.

“My biggest fear was everything was gone,” the novelist from New Orleans told Inside Edition.

As he discovered the home in flames, he knew he couldn't leave his work to burn.

“I just came springing up here. Basically just made sure I had a point of entry where no one was going to be able to stop me because I knew they wouldn’t want me in the building,” he said. “There was a perimeter of firefighters and a lot of official looking people there and I knew if I asked they would say no, so I found an opening and ran through.”

Once inside his home in the Big Easy, he spotted his laptop. Somehow it was still intact in all the rubble.

“By the time I had that in my hands, the firemen were there saying, 'you can’t be there,'” he said.

The book was the first installment of a seven-part series in a fantasy fiction genre.

Hodge's fiancé, Aurora Walker, was stunned when she found out he'd run into the fire.

“What I did when I found out he went into the house. I was really angry,” she said. “I thought, ‘my God, what if the roof had fallen in on him? What if the fire had engulfed the living room when he was in there?’”

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The writer says if the situation were to happen again, he would still run into the blaze.

“If I were to do the whole thing again, I wouldn’t change anything,” he admitted.

Hodge is now backing up all of his work onto a hard drive.

Hodge has set up a GoFundMe page to help get back on his feet after the blaze. He has also setup a preorder for his novel. 

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