So I managed to get a large chunk of my writing off the old, schizophrenic laptop's hard drive (it chuckled evilly all the time, but didn't actually crash except the once) and have added almost all my viable works in progress and their word counts over there on the right side of the blog.
One down, two to go.
The PC is going to be a bugger. It doesn't recognize the keyboard or the mouse. I'd just forget about it, but I know there is at least one project on there that I want to complete, and there very well may be several I've forgotten about. The other ancient floppy drive Dell laptop I may just let rest in peace. The stuff on there is so old, it might as well be written in cuneiform.
What really blows me away is just how much there is. Over the last eight years I've started many, many stories. Some of them I abandoned for good reason- they stunk. But what surprised me today as I went over the material I recovered from the laptop is just how not bad most of it is. Not perfect, certainly, but you can't expect unfinished first drafts to be flawless gems.
The other thing I noticed was that I seem to have progressed over time, writing-wise. Sentences become sleeker, better crafted, with less padding and better word choice. Not to toot my own horn, but I have matured as a writer- or at least as a writer of beginnings. At the time I was writing these, the initial spark of an idea and the excitement that accompanied it quicky fizzled. I was sure it was dreck.
Nice to know I was improving nonetheless.
Now they're up there for all to see- the word counts, I mean, not the stories themselves. I'll keep it updated for myself, if no-one else. It's a good spur. :)
An adventure is, by nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. ~G.K. Chesterton
7 comments:
Do you need to borrow (semi-permanently) a Netbook? I have one sitting next to my TV, but I use USB sticks now anyway direct to my DVD...
(I am trying to divest myself of redundant technology.)
btw - I put 21 of the posts rescued from the old blog into a word file - 21,244 words. And that only from Jan to August 2004. How many novels could i have written? I mean word count wise, not story or character or anything...
I would really recommend getting your writing onto the "cloud". Set up a gmail apps account and use docs to write. You get instant save, ready done backups and a computer like E@L's netbook is more than you need.
Since going cloud at work I have never looked back...it is just so easy and makes a lot of sense.
My 1.5 cents.
Evernote is my nimbus of choice for writing notes, blogs etc... with automatic synch across ANY device you might possibly have. We will be moving to Google for work.
E@L- Thanks, but I'm set electronics-wise :)
E@L- 21k words = 1/4 of a genre novel. :)
Ant & E@L- I'm considering it, but honestly don't want to deal with the learning curve until things settle down a bit more
If I can teach 11 year olds to use GApps in as little as an hour, I reckon I can get you started in the length of time it takes to drink a cup of coffee :-)
Unless you love the longhand journal method...which would be cool as well. :-)
Careful, i may be forced to take you up on that :)
And I do write longhand, but only when I'm starting to explore an idea. Once it takes root I transer it over to electrons. If it doesn't it dies a quiet little death in one journal or notebook or another and the corpse waits for my biographer to discover it.
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