So I recently posted that I finally got Scrivener set up and was ready to buckle down and get to work. Yeah. So, I began the second part of my planned paranormal series, was quite pleased with the first chapter – this would have been late Sunday night. Any-hoo, wrote the first draft of chapter one, Robert and Allison’s story, and added more background detail for the main characters for my use. Saved what I wrote, closed Scrivener, put my laptop to sleep and headed to bed. After several hours of tossing and turning, got back up – the story had grabbed me, and even though I was exhausted, I wanted… no, needed, to write.
Woke my laptop, opened Scrivener, and… my first chapter wasn’t there. Whaaaa? I checked each PC, hoping against hope that the saved draft might be found on one of them, but no luck. *sighs* So I rewrote the damn chapter. It was different, I’m sure, but still had the gist of my first draft. But I was sure the original writing was better. *sighs* I had this interesting second scene where it began showing Allison’s personality and traits, but at this point I was totally exhausted. So I saved, etc. and crashed for a few hours.
Once I awakened and had coffee and all that stuff, I grabbed my laptop so I could continue working on Allison and Robert’s story… scene two was missing! *screams* I walked away from my laptop, even though I wanted to write… I was so upset about my missing writing, again, that I was afraid I might toss my laptop. Bare with me, folks. I don’t typically toss expensive technology around, but was going on very limited sleep so was afraid my normal better instincts might not prevail. However, I eventually went back and rewrote scene two and tried to remember that additional backstory I had created for the main characters. Here’s the thing, though. Some of my earlier notes were there, while huge chunks were missing… it was like someone had gotten on my laptop and deleted sections from my writings. Here comes the ‘but’. These are new laptops, no one knows the passwords – but me; I live alone and no one had stopped by or visited; I had saved before shutting the program down, in fact, would click the ‘save’ button about every three minutes, or so….
So sometime on Tuesday, after I had crashed, etc. [I’m really on a weird schedule, falling asleep somewhere between ten in the morning to two in the afternoon, catching around four to six hours sleep and then staying up all night long writing, watching TV and playing games on my desktop PC.] Any-hoo, on Tuesday night, after needing to rewrite a huge chunk, again, I researched ways to save my work in Scrivener. I was just about ready to give the damn program up and go back to using Word, I was so frustrated – but I absolutely LOVE the convenience of having all of my notes stored in the same place… so I found this article where a writer said the save button in Scrivener didn’t actually save anything, that she used the ‘back up’ function to keep her work safe. After I was done writing for a few hours, I made a back up AND saved my work in progress….
And another huge chunk was missing! What the fu…! By that point, I was getting paranoid, lemme tell ya. I went through the back up steps again, late Tuesday night; closed the program and reopened it a half hour later. The back up copy was finally there. Yay! I did this several times through out the night, as I finished chapter one – again – and started chapter two. I need to get back to work on chapter two, I’ve started a bit of a mystery at this point… after the last three frustrating days, I’m almost afraid to open the program, though! *laughs* And, Dingy, Bill, and the girls are heading my way soon – they’re also bringing Triste, my new pitbull puppy.
Uh, welcome to the world of writing! *grins* M’kay, I am so outtie….