October 2nd, 2009

Today’s progress:

Project: White Raven draft two

New words: 2,410

Total words: 89,968

Goal: 100k

Writing:

A surpringly good day, given that I’m utterly exhausted.  I mostly worked on the scenes that I’d sketched out yesterday, which involved fleshing them out properly.  Also had a couple of minor epiphanies about the plot, and little things that I need to go back and add in on the next round of edits.

This has, unfortunately, had the side effect of making me want to go back and edit this right now.  Which isn’t going to happen.  I still plan on getting this draft done and leaving it to sit until I have the mental energy and time to come back and work on it again.  The next draft should, in theory, be faster, since I’m mostly going to go through and add in a few minor bits and work on fleshing out some of the writing itself.  I’m fairly happy with the general shape of the plot, and so it should stay intact from here on in.  Unless some of my betas find massive plot holes, which could happen.

Real life:

Laundry accomplished and is on the line drying (hooray for spring finally being here!).  I’ve also been taking breaks to get some bits and pieces done around the house.  I believe this may be called nesting

I’m going to go for a walk in a bit, and then maybe do some more bits and pieces around the house.  I am tired of the fact that I’ve left tonnes of stuff half done (since we moved in almost two years ago, in some cases) and I want some order around here.  Okay, I have officially become Crazy Pregnant Woman.  Good thing there’s only nine weeks to go

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

On backing up information

As I sit here right now, I’m going through my usual routine on a Friday.

This routine?  After I finish writing, I back up my current WIP folder (neatly generated for me by Page Four) to a flash drive.  I also back up this folder to Dropbox, which is one of my favourite things in the world (and doubly so this week, since they just released an app for the iPhone).

These first two steps, I do every day.  On a Friday, I also burn a CD of my entire writing folder.  This contains every word I have ever written, along with all of my submission information, some of which reaches back longer than I care to admit.

I have a slightly ridiculous number of CDs burned now, many of which (clearly) contain redundant data.  But honestly, I’d rather deal with having a few stacks of CDs that duplicate each other than losing my work.  I’ve had it happen before – and seen it happen, in spectacular and dreadful fashion – when I was writing my PhD thesis to another student, who lost about three completed chapters of a thesis.

It makes life easier for me that I only ever write on my laptop.  I’m nowhere near as good as backing up my desktop, I will admit.  But the loss of files there would be nowhere as catastrophic.

Sometimes it’s a pain keeping on top of it – on a bad day, I’d like to just shut down the laptop and walk away.  But I make myself back things up as part of my routine.  And if you haven’t noticed by now that I’m a creature of habit who thrives on routine, you haven’t been watching too closely.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.