I’m doing the second draft rewrites on chapter three, which actually means I am doing everything I can to distract myself from doing the rewrites on chapter three.
Writing IS hard work. If anyone says differently, here is my suggestion to you: poke them in the eye. Then explain that since in the land of the blind the one eyed person is king, you have just ennobled them. They should feel honored, but with power comes responsibility.
I took the day off from writing because my computer blowed up on Tuesday evening. All was going well, then one reboot later… KABLOOEY!
A-tip-typing on the computer is the way I write.
However, no fear from me. I’ve saved all my writing on three different cloud services. Why?
It pays to be paranoid!
I actually lost a novel once. In 2011, I had completed the first draft of a novel when my hard drive crashed. I don’t think it was an editorial statement from the hard drive, that the work was so bad that the hard drive committed suicide rather than store another bit. I tried not to take it that way, anyway.
Since I hadn’t printed out the novel, it was completely gone into the aether, along with everything else I’d written prior to 2011. Kill your babies, indeed!
So I have been studious in backing EVERYTHING up on various online services. Currently, I use OneDrive, Dropbox, and iCloud. Save for massive EMP caused from multiple nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere, I feel pretty safe about things.
So when my C: drive went kerflooey, all was… well, not FINE, but I wasn’t hyperventilating either. I had no pictures or documents on that drive that I didn’t have elsewhere. The novel I am working on is both saved on multiple remote servers AND printed out for markup.
So SAVE EARLY, SAVE OFTEN! Whether you need to print things out or copy everything onto an external drive, do it! Safeguard your thoughts. Not only CAN it happen to you, given enough time it WILL happen to you!
Trust me on this one.
Share your horror stories, IF YOU DARE!
I hate long sentences. I hate having to follow a description that takes a long time to settle down. It feels like being shipwrecked. There I am, floating on someone’s words, not knowing if I am going to starve to death before I reach the end.
Imagine reading a sentence out loud. If you have to come up for air, the sentence is too long.
I would like to talk about writing about putting sex in your novel, but alas I know nothing about sex. I am married.
Just a second…
You wake up, you plop yourself down in front of the keyboard, the desk with your notebook, or a fresh clay tablet and a writing stylus, and…
Nothing. Big blank. Beyond nothing. You’ve discovered an idea singularity, where the smallest notion (once if falls past the event horizon) is irretrievably gone. You can’t even get close to the idea because the singularity is small… perhaps only a little over three solar masses. The tidal forces and radiation would rip you to shreds and fry you. Great news if you’re General Tso’s Chicken*, but not if you are a writer.
The BIGGEST minutiae 