KD Boldly Ran Away, Away

For various reasons, the last few years have been a bit rough for me. To make things even better, my haven for so much of my life, my writing, has not come easily. It’s a problem endemic in writing books– if you want your characters to resonate, then even sci fi and fantasy must reflect reality, and reality has really not been something I wanted to think about.

I like to write hopeful, I mean. And hope has been hard to find.

Anyway. So there have been various crises. There’s been All The News You Need to Hide From. And then…

I’ve heard there are people out there who just use Word to write books. I am not one of them. I remember the day I gave up on Word. I’d been typing up something for work, and three times in a row I typed “7th” and Word made the “th” superscript and then crashed because it couldn’t handle its own autocorrection. When I got done swearing the third time, I went and found and downloaded OpenOffice.

OpenOffice was great! I was devoted for years–but then came the siren call of dedicated fiction writing software. I wanted. But I was poor, and it was expensive, and OpenOffice worked fine…

Winners of NaNoWriMo 2011 received a code for (IIRC) 50% off a Scrivener license. People on the NaNo boards loved Scrivener. I think I downloaded the trial version halfway through, and then bought a license when I got my discount.

Since that fateful download, I’ve used Scrivener as my word processor. I love it! I can go just as much in-detail down-in-the-weeds of my book as I want (scene cards! keywords! character and arc color coding!) or don’t want. (Just close the binder and the inspector, and write. On whatever color background I want!) And it autosaves every time you do something!

You may guess I was very excited when, after years of promises and delays, Scrivener 3 for Windows was announced. Skipping right over Scrivener 2! Finally, all the updates! It would practically (I thought) write my book for me! Well, okay, it couldn’t be that good. But it was new and shiny, an update of a program I already loved, and I wanted it. And I wanted to support the company! Screw you, Word. Never coming back.

On 3/24/21, I bought the new Scrivener. It wanted to convert all my files, but first it would make a backup, just in case! Awesome. They thought of everything.

Do you see what’s coming? I didn’t.

Reader, it created blank backups. I didn’t notice at first, so I converted a number of files that opened blank in Scrivener 3, but that was okay, there were backups and–oh. Oh frak.

Before, if you had asked me if I had up-to-date backups, I would have said yes. I save not-Scrivener files in an online backup, and on every computer linked to it. Scrivener doesn’t play nice with the cloud, though, so I kept those on my computer BUT I would create zipped backups, and save them to the cloud. That’s safe, as long as you don’t open them there. I also have an external drive for the exclusive purpose of doing backups weekly.

Somehow, though, the external drive failed me. The backups weren’t what they should be. But that’s why I had redundancies! You only have to lose writing once, I would explain to people. After that, you learn.

But–and here was the thing–as I looked for my backups, I wondered. Were these really up to date backups? So many of them hadn’t been touched in so long! How could this half-written novel be ten years untouched? Surely I’d worked on it recently. What if I hadn’t backed it up then? What if I’d actually lost ten years of working on it off and on? What if I’d just lost years of writing?

What if I really hadn’t written much of anything in literal years?

I dropped it. Forgot about it, ignored it. Pretended everything was fine and went to watch…Ghost Adventures, maybe. I dunno.

May 14th, 2021, I emailed tech support. I was hoping other people had the same problem, and a fix would be put out, and I just had to be patient… But no. Tech support became my biggest correspondent for a while, but no amount of dragging through all those files and backups would get me back what I had–files that I knew were the most up-to-date and also that I’d hopefully touched in the last ten years.

Just thinking about it now makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me want to run and hide in a fourth rewatch of Bob Ross. Or Blue Planet. Blargh.

Every once in a while, for some reason, without having noticed that I fell into auto-pilot in my life, I wake up and realize that I’m not spending my life how I want to spend it. Not living it up in a mansion or anything (though it’d be nice!) but just…spending hours wandering the internet instead of writing. Watching nature documentaries I’ve seen five times, instead of reading a book. Rereading beloved books, instead of a new one, even.

There should be time for all of that, don’t get me wrong. A life without loafing is not worth living. But there may be just a bit too much of it going on.

Anyway. This week I woke up, and I realized that I haven’t been able to write easily since the backups blowup. That was when things went kablooey, and stayed that way. I can’t move forward on any of that stuff until I solve the backups problem, which is, indeed, huge and overwhelming. But it must be done. (Thirty-seven, dear reader. There are thirty-seven works that must be found in their last backup, and then moved into the new program, and then zip-saved.)

(Thirty-seven.)

So I’m working on that. In between running away some more. I mean, it’s really stressful, y’all. And I’ve got plenty of stress already.

I hope, though, that soon I will be working away again, happily writing books that I know are properly backed up.

Maybe it’s time to invest in another external hard drive…? I’ll tell you what, I will be figuring out what went wrong there. And also compiling my Scrivener files into RTF files so at least I will know that I have the manuscripts. Maybe I’ll even print stuff out. And take copies to work, in case of a house fire.

How many redundancies is too many? Hello, Department of Redundancies Department?