Thursday, February 21, 2008

Wait..no!...ARGH...hold it...maybe...whew!

So there I as this morning, all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, working blissfully away. I had to move back and forth between chapters, seeing if something had been revealed already or not. So I'm moving and clicking and suddenly...wait! What the -- !

The computer froze. I had to restart.

I'd saved some of the chapters I'd cut material from, but the main one I'd been working on?

You guessed it.

No.


AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!

But wait! Doesn't it automatically save things?

Yes. So I hit "revert to saved Chapter Nine."

But it reverted to an even earlier version from this morning.

Yeesh.

Fortunately, I save everything on diskette (yes, I still use diskettes. My cell phone also has an antenna. Scoff away!) so I had all the material I was in the process of moving. And then I had something called "documents" -- the other files I hadn't closed before I shut the computer down. I labeled those "A" - as in Original File NameA. I sure wasn't deleting anything!

What a morning! Oh, and I also discovered that, for some strange reason, Chapter Six is only eight pages long. What the heck is up with that???

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank goodness you had it saved! I lost half a chapter a month ago and had to rewrite the whole thing. My whole screen went black and I couldn't access anything-I thought my whole computer died.

And, I had to laugh at your diskette and cell phone antenna comment.

My hubby, who's 36, is "old school"-he refuses to get an mp3 player, his cell phone has an antenna, and he collects cassette tapes. He gets all nostalgic over rotary dial phones. And it goes on and on.
He's proud of being permanently stuck in the 80's. Cracks me up.

Margaret Moore said...

Hey, I still have (and use) one rotary phone! I remember when one of son's friends was over many years ago. He looked at and said, "How does it work?"

I back everything up at the end of the writing day, and generally hit save often, because my writing-only computer does have a tendency to freeze. One of these days, I'll have to get a new hard drive. We already replaced the big ol' monitor with a flat one -- love that innovation!

Kimber Chin said...

Oh, boy. Lets just say that we have such a strange collection of phones (given to us free from offices) that my Mom thought I was collecting phones and bought me an antique one (one with a crank)!

I usually email my chapters to myself. That way I have a copy and I can work on them from any location.