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I hate hate hate losing things. I mean I hate it. Whenever I lose something it makes me just want to throw down my pen and scream. I just lost some stuff that I spent about two hours working on (mind you I was half-watching tv at the time but still) and it's driving me insane. I had a folder that had two critiques and a marked up copy of the first chapter of my WIP and I had rewritten a decent chunk of it and was fairly happy with it. Now I can't find that stupid folder it just disappeared and it's driving me insane. Does this happen to other people out there and is it as frustrating for you? I mean if I lose three thousand words sometimes I won't write for a couple of weeks because I don't want to go on without it because there are always little things that I like to build on and I don't like having holes in my story. Argh, at least it was only editing and not actual story, that's even worse.
For that reason, I keep my writings in the same folder and have the Word program save automatically every 5 minutes. I also date every draft and every day I work on it gets saved seperatly. It creates lots of redundencies and uses disk space, but if I lose something, it is never 3000 words.
posted
I've had my computer lock up on me after writing 10 pages. Luckily I have it automatically save every couple of mintues, so everything was recovered.
As for your other problem--loosing stuff--have you tried buying a cheap, two-drawer file cabinet? I'm not an unorganized person by nature, but the filing cabinet helps me keep everything together.
posted
3000 words? That's nothing. I once lost everything. Not just that story, but every piece of fiction on my computer. I suffered a mental breakdown, then, where elves and sprites were telling me that my stories had gone on to better places, and were playing with St. Peter in the sky.
posted
I think every writer loses something in his life. Hemmingway lost most of his young work on a train. A teacher stole the first thing I ever wrote. (I shouldn't say stole, I gave it to her but it's still long gone.) More recently I lost the Storyline to my Constant WIP. I put it somewhere safe so it wouldn't get lost but I don't know where that place is. (But it must be filled with all sorts of wonders.)
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
I'm completley paranoid about loosing something I write. That's why I save it to my computer, make a back-up disk, and print out a copy to put in my files.
When I would write things out on paper, I would always loose them, so I know how it feels. But I just tell myself it was fate (it was not human error dangit!) and try to move on.
posted
Sometimes I wonder if the best thing that can happen to a writer is if they loose everything they've ever written. I'm certainly not advocating deleting everything you've written, but there's something to be said about having a fresh start, with nothing behind save experience. Loosing everything is certainly the ultimate fresh start.
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Now that's a horrible thing to envision. With three novels in the works, ideas for five more, and dozens of shorts... if I lost it it wouldn't be a "fresh start" it would be depression central. In fact it is my single greatest fear. I usually run a double hard drive, several floppy disks, hardcopies, burned CD's and file sharing on a friend's computer.
It's not because you say I'm paranoid that THEY aren't out to get me.
posted
I always do print-out every ten pages or so, plus offsite backups as attachments on external servers, multiple computers, and burned CDs.
Once, on a bus, I lost two hours of my life watching the movie Duplex. It was painful for many reasons, but [SPOILER WARNING] worst among them was watching the laptop with the only copy of the MC's book on it get crunched. I spent five minutes sitting there, torn between the vicarious freak-out and wondering how big of an idiot he was for not printing the damned thing earlier.
posted
Yeah, it can be a bummer when you look for something you wrote and can't find it. For me it isn't the time lost, it's the fact that if I've lost it, I can't enjoy reading it again.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
Do Gnomes steal other things, too, HSO? Because my DVDs of the third season of "Rurouni Kenshin" AND my "Serial Experiments: Lain" DVDs recently disappeared. If it was those stupid gnomes, I'm going to punt them so hard.
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Dec 2003
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