NaNo Save

NaNo Week Two is under way. The sagging middle doldrums hit Thursday. If those of you are participating in NaNo read this week's pep talks, you'll know that Week Two is capitalized for a reason. It's the week where I start questioning everything. Thursday I wrote 2100 words to make up for the writing I didn't do Wednesday. Nearly half of it got cut yesterday when I realized I left out a major plot point. That's what I get for improvising in the midst of Week Two doldrums.

Whether you love what you've written or not, today is the day to save it. On October 30, Lindsey Grant sent out a "Charting a course through NaNoLand" email that gives all NaNoWriMos a basic itinerary. This is what she had to say for today, November 13: Stop what you’re doing and back up your novel on a flash drive, email it to yourself, burn it onto a CD, or do all three!
Even for those of you who aren't doing NaNo, if you haven't backed up your hard drive, now might be a good time to do it. Also - when saving your writing files, please oh please make sure you're coherent. A good night's rest is recommended. I say this because in the spring when my now deceased laptop fried, I learned from our tech guy that instead of transferring my documents I had been hitting the "Copy Shortcut" instead of the "Copy" button without realizing it. (This may sound incredibly stupid but the "Copy Shortcut" button is right underneath the "Copy" button on the right-click menu, something I too failed to notice.) Thank goodness I had two backup hard drives at the time that saved the bulk of my work, otherwise I would've lost countless manuscripts and hundreds of pages worth of writing notes. Yikes! Over the summer while I was working on audio book edits with my AudioLark editor, I was staying up to all hours to meet deadlines and I did it again. Thankfully, only one document was effected and I lost over thirty pages from my Regency romance to the ether.

The moral of this story is to back up your WIP and all other important files often but be sure to do it smartly. I recommend following Lindsey's advice and using several back-up techniques, mentioned above. After what happened in the spring, I now have three back-up hard drives (two from passed computers) that I update every 10 to 15 days.

Looking forward to Week Three and the end of this week's writing blues....