Friday 4 November 2011

NaNoWriMo Update

So it was going well - with last night's total of 6200, I was well over the average needed per day.

Today I had to drive up to Preston (about 30 miles away) to start clearing my step-mother's apartment  (she died last May but, due to various complications over her estate we've been in limbo since then). Anyway, I spent the day sorting through her living room while a couple of friends tackled the huge amount of clothes in her bedroom and bagged them, ready to take to the charity shops.

Back here, after a few traffic jams, on the way at 5pm, and soon I start writing again.  Then, after I'd done about 1,000 words, I hit some key and the whole thing disappeared!  What????  When I finally found it again, it was at the point I'd left it last night!  What on earth happened to autosave, set at 5 minutes? 

After half an hour of trying to find and restore the updated document with no success, I gave up and decided there was nothing else for it but to rewrite those 1,000 words.

This kind of thing would be annoying enough (hmm, that's putting it mildly - and politely!) when you're writing anything, but with NaNoWriMo, where every words counts, it was nothing short of disastrous. But, with the bit between my teeth (and after a few swear words), I started writing those 1000 words again.

Fortunately I was able to rememebr most of what I'd written (cue for loud cheer that my short-term memory still seems to be functioning okay), but really, one does not need this kind of thing during NaNoWriMo! I've checked that Autosave is set to 5 mins, but I don't trust it because some key on keyboard bypasses that system somewhere, so I'm hitting save virtually every 10 words.

So- tomorrow is another day :-)

BTW anyone know what key I could possibly have hit to delete today's update on a document without some pop-up box askijg me if I wanted to save it???

12 comments:

  1. Ah, computers. It's amazing how they do things they were never programmed to do. And it's never good things.

    mood

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  2. Hi Paula1 I feel your pain. I've no idea how you could have deleted so much without some message coming up! Gremlins at work? After the day you had you didn't need that! Glad you dusted yourself off and got going again.

    I just buddied up with you on NaNo. I see you've stolen the name of my next book - Dreaming of Paris. Just kidding. I'm actually setting my latest in Afghanistan and the research is so horrific I'm so depressed about the women there I can hardly write! Better go write some chick lit instead!

    Have fun.

    Denise

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  3. It never rains but it pours, does it? After the day you had, I'm impressed that you sat down to write at all!

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  4. Paula, that's nasty :( I'm just glad you managed to recover from your setback but no one needs such things happening during Nano.

    I'm nycelle on the Nano boards if you want to add me, what's your username?

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  5. Great that you've written so many words - shame about the missing 1000. Not sure what would cause that, probably a combination of two keys.

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  6. Mood - you're so right, computers definitely have a mind of their own at time, usually a malicious mind!

    Denise - I don't understand either how it got deleted without some 'save' prompt coming up. Very ambitious of you to set your book in Afghanistan - wish you well with it.

    Sarah - sitting down to write was my escapism after a mixed emtions day!

    Ellen - just added you as a buddy :-)

    Rosemary, it's never happened before, usually autosave recovers the doc, but not this time :( Now I'm paranoid about saving!

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  7. Hi Paula
    Been out of blogworld for a while but just dropped by to wish you good luck with Nanowrimo - only to read of your disaster last night! The text wasn't somehow cut to the clipboard was it? (i.e. highlighted, for word count, and you accidentally pressed ctrl x?) If anything disappears from my screen, I often try ctrl v, to paste whatever's on clipboard, just in case missing text is lurking there ... But the shortcut key that's scared me witless most often is ctrl n (opens a new file). Results in screenful of words instantly going blank :-( Luckily it's retrievable simply by swopping back to the other window :-)
    Good luck !!

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  8. Hi Writing Pad! Thanks for visiting. I checked everything (and I mean everything!) for about half an hour, trying to find the deleted section of my document, but it wasn't on the clipboard and hadn't been saved anywhere else :-(

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  9. I've been using scrivener recently as my writing program and it saves after every 2 seconds of inactivity, which means even when I accidentally shut the program down, I didn't lose anything.

    Congrats on re-writing. I know exactly how hard that is. (long story short, I lost my entire NaNoWriMo project a few years back when my hard drive completely seized up. I had a spare copy on CD but when I went to load it back up, I found that it had gotten knocked off my desk and chipped.

    This year I'm double backing up. And emailing my daily work to my best friend (she's sort of reading along and serving as a back up storage vault)

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  10. Ooh, double disaster finding your CD was chipped, that really must have p...ed you off.
    I email the latest version of my Nano doc to myself every night, so I can retrieve it if anything goes wrong.
    But my recent disaster happened part way through a sentence I was writing!
    Ah well, I picked myself up and started again - now at 9,500 words and on a roll - yay!

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  11. I'd be so mad! I don't blame you for hitting the save button so many times.

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  12. I was more mystified to start with, Donna - as in WTF????!
    Thanks for dropping in.

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