Progress Report: 2/9/09--2/15/09
Starvation
Word Count: 15,659
Page Count: 77
Funny story about Chapter Eight. Monday, I finally got over myself and put my ass in the chair and started writing. I'd found that thread I needed to get the chapter going, so I was able to write. I liked what I was doing, even though there was a little voice niggling in the back of my head saying I was rambling and didn't need some of this. But whatever. I'm allowed to ignore that little voice.
That little voice, however, would not be ignored. Somehow, it manifested itself onto the physical plane and arranged it so that Word would crash while I was trying to save the file. When I opened the file back up, my two-plus pages of single-spaced text became TWO PARAGRAPHS of single-spaced text.
I was furious. Livid. So pissed off that after I sent an email to my two best friends BITCHING about this occurrence I still wasn't able to move on, so I called chicklitter (one of said best friends) to promptly bitch about it SOME MORE. Because let's face it: when you're writing, and you suddenly lose the file you're working on? It's like somebody's popping your balloon, telling you no matter how wonderful or awful those words were you wrote, THEY'RE NOT EVEN WORTHY TO BE SAVED. I mean, what's the point of continuing on after that?
This occurrence has made me do a couple things: 1) remind me how often I need to manually save my file as I write. 2) keep an eye out for other word processing programs that don't have "Microsoft" attached to them in any way, form, or fashion. 3) Fix my preferences so that Word automatically saves every five minutes, a preference that used to be set as such, but had been forgotten about when I updated Word to the latest and greatest version, where the default is ten minutes, not five. Bastards.
Anyway. It's taken me a week to get over it, and I finally sat down and got chapter eight squeezed out using the two paragraphs Word left me with and going in a direction that worked much better than my previous rambling. I still haven't achieved THE GOAL I'd intended for this chapter, but I've pushed said goal off to chapter nine, where it absolutely has to happen. And it will. This coming week is full of reruns and no-shows on tv, so I won't have my usual distractions at my beck and call. Not like I can't manufacture my own distraction anyway (there's always books to read, RockBand to play, and kitties to terrorize), but I have a good feeling about getting work done this next week. So there.
Word Count: 15,659
Page Count: 77
Funny story about Chapter Eight. Monday, I finally got over myself and put my ass in the chair and started writing. I'd found that thread I needed to get the chapter going, so I was able to write. I liked what I was doing, even though there was a little voice niggling in the back of my head saying I was rambling and didn't need some of this. But whatever. I'm allowed to ignore that little voice.
That little voice, however, would not be ignored. Somehow, it manifested itself onto the physical plane and arranged it so that Word would crash while I was trying to save the file. When I opened the file back up, my two-plus pages of single-spaced text became TWO PARAGRAPHS of single-spaced text.
I was furious. Livid. So pissed off that after I sent an email to my two best friends BITCHING about this occurrence I still wasn't able to move on, so I called chicklitter (one of said best friends) to promptly bitch about it SOME MORE. Because let's face it: when you're writing, and you suddenly lose the file you're working on? It's like somebody's popping your balloon, telling you no matter how wonderful or awful those words were you wrote, THEY'RE NOT EVEN WORTHY TO BE SAVED. I mean, what's the point of continuing on after that?
This occurrence has made me do a couple things: 1) remind me how often I need to manually save my file as I write. 2) keep an eye out for other word processing programs that don't have "Microsoft" attached to them in any way, form, or fashion. 3) Fix my preferences so that Word automatically saves every five minutes, a preference that used to be set as such, but had been forgotten about when I updated Word to the latest and greatest version, where the default is ten minutes, not five. Bastards.
Anyway. It's taken me a week to get over it, and I finally sat down and got chapter eight squeezed out using the two paragraphs Word left me with and going in a direction that worked much better than my previous rambling. I still haven't achieved THE GOAL I'd intended for this chapter, but I've pushed said goal off to chapter nine, where it absolutely has to happen. And it will. This coming week is full of reruns and no-shows on tv, so I won't have my usual distractions at my beck and call. Not like I can't manufacture my own distraction anyway (there's always books to read, RockBand to play, and kitties to terrorize), but I have a good feeling about getting work done this next week. So there.