Your hands are shaking cold.
Dec. 7th, 2008 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dejanaMicrosoft Word SUCKS!
The truth about my NaNo is, it was the same story idea that I used the first time I attempted NaNo in 2004. I didn't get far that time, only a few thousand words, and it had been four years, so I figured I was OK to use the same plot as long as I started over from scratch. This was especially easy being that most of what I wrote in 2004 was a prologue set in the future with completely different characters... and half of that had been lost due to a corrupted file. When I tracked down my 2004 file, I discovered the middle of it had been wiped out by erratic pages of garbled mess. I was able to save most of it, but MS Word had chewed up and swallowed the middle. Good thing it was only a prologue.
Fast forward to today. I forgot to add my progress bar to the post I made last night, so I logged on to edit it in. I opened my NaNo file to find the page count had mysteriously jumped from 97 to 118, and thousands of words had disappeared. When I scrolled down, sure enough, several pages had been wiped out by corrupted garbage.
DAMN YOU MSWORD!
Maybe it's because I had pasted in what I had left of my original prologue after NaNo ended, I don't know. I'd been worried about the file going bad since I was nearing 100 pages, and I've had bad luck with MS Word files going wonky at that size, but I figured maybe since I had a new computer it would be okay. Nope. Or maybe my flash drive choked on it. Who knows, but I'm not very happy with Word right now. How do authors handle electronic copies of their novels? It has to be possible to have a file of more than 100 pages, or no one could ever submit a manuscript. Am I just cursed, or something?
Fortunately, I had been making a backup copy of my NaNo, and that file was still intact. I hadn't made a backup since winning NaNo on November 30th, but I also hadn't written much since then. So I lost part of a new scene, but it's not nearly as bad as it could've been. If I'd lost much more, I probably would've called it quits, to tell you the truth. I lost half of my first original novel a number of years ago and that was almost the end of writing for me, and I had a handwritten first draft of that one. I have no such hard copy this time. Due to the word count requirement of NaNo, I typed it all directly. If anything happens to these fragile little MS Word files, I'll have nothing.
Hell with this typed first draft thing, man. Long live the handwritten longhand copy. At least that can't vanish in the blink of an eye. You can bet I'll be buying myself some new notebook paper before starting my next project.
The truth about my NaNo is, it was the same story idea that I used the first time I attempted NaNo in 2004. I didn't get far that time, only a few thousand words, and it had been four years, so I figured I was OK to use the same plot as long as I started over from scratch. This was especially easy being that most of what I wrote in 2004 was a prologue set in the future with completely different characters... and half of that had been lost due to a corrupted file. When I tracked down my 2004 file, I discovered the middle of it had been wiped out by erratic pages of garbled mess. I was able to save most of it, but MS Word had chewed up and swallowed the middle. Good thing it was only a prologue.
Fast forward to today. I forgot to add my progress bar to the post I made last night, so I logged on to edit it in. I opened my NaNo file to find the page count had mysteriously jumped from 97 to 118, and thousands of words had disappeared. When I scrolled down, sure enough, several pages had been wiped out by corrupted garbage.
DAMN YOU MSWORD!
Maybe it's because I had pasted in what I had left of my original prologue after NaNo ended, I don't know. I'd been worried about the file going bad since I was nearing 100 pages, and I've had bad luck with MS Word files going wonky at that size, but I figured maybe since I had a new computer it would be okay. Nope. Or maybe my flash drive choked on it. Who knows, but I'm not very happy with Word right now. How do authors handle electronic copies of their novels? It has to be possible to have a file of more than 100 pages, or no one could ever submit a manuscript. Am I just cursed, or something?
Fortunately, I had been making a backup copy of my NaNo, and that file was still intact. I hadn't made a backup since winning NaNo on November 30th, but I also hadn't written much since then. So I lost part of a new scene, but it's not nearly as bad as it could've been. If I'd lost much more, I probably would've called it quits, to tell you the truth. I lost half of my first original novel a number of years ago and that was almost the end of writing for me, and I had a handwritten first draft of that one. I have no such hard copy this time. Due to the word count requirement of NaNo, I typed it all directly. If anything happens to these fragile little MS Word files, I'll have nothing.
Hell with this typed first draft thing, man. Long live the handwritten longhand copy. At least that can't vanish in the blink of an eye. You can bet I'll be buying myself some new notebook paper before starting my next project.
