You Imagine discussion

My flash drive! I lost too many stories to uncooperative computers. Plus, I love having it in my bag wherever I go, it's like my secret writing weapon -- I can plug into any computer anywhere and escape dreaded family gatherings or simply boredom. And it means I have no excuse not to write every day.

How frusssstrating!

I remember one time I almost got mad because I lost one of my notebooks at our ward camp-out and I thought someone threw it into the fire!

When I was finishing my first novel I used to work between two locations and transfer the document on a floppy disk. I had just finished the final draft and managed to corrupt the floppy. It was the only copy. The last hard copy I'd printed was 40,000 words long so I had to rewrite 10,000 from my notes. I'll tell you, there was no talking to me for a couple of days after that.

Now I have backups of everything I've ever written on three separate computers AND on disk AND on a flash drive and I have Word configured so it saves backups automatically plus I have hard copies too. Oh, and I hit Save after every wee change I make.

After every "wee change", Jim? Ehm, I canna help but tease ye about ye bein' Scottish. Glaswegian at that. :O)

the thing that drives me nuts is when i hand-write something, and then go type it up on the computer. for one of my stories, i have pages of hand-written, and am WAY behind in my typing... i need to get caught up there...

I wrote the first two drafts of my novel, The MoonQuest entirely by hand. But to avoid the problem that Snowfoot is talking about, I committed to always typing up the day's writing (without making editorial changes!) before I went to bed each night. That way I avoided nightmarish backlogs!

My computer has the odd habit of saving to a disk but not to the hard drive! Several times I had to copy from the disc and put a chapter back in a story. Now, I save to the hard drive, a disk, and periodically to a CD. My son has told me you can never have too many back-ups. His Mother's Day gift to me was a Cruzer Micro!

To Mark David: When I started out, I wrote everything in longhand and then typed it on a portable typewriter, then reread and edited it just before I went to sleep. When I got my first computer (I've gone through 4 now and 8 printers), I continued that practice until I realized I could compose directly into the computer. Still ran a hard copy, though. Now--getting lazy in my old age--I just makes lots of back-ups, but I have all the old hardcopies from all those bygone computer. Thank Goodness!