NaNoWriMo Horror Story - Day 1

Here I was starting on this 30-day adventure to write a 50,000 word novel when disaster struck. On the first day. It was horrible and painful, and lessons were learned from it. Let me start at the beginning...

I stayed up Friday night to start writing at midnight. I wrote for two hours and got 1700 words done. I went to bed feeling good about my progress. The next day I continued to work on it throughout the day an hour or two at a time. I had set a goal of writing 5000 words that day, so I kept at it with breaks for college football and yard work. By mid-afternoon I was about half way to my goal. Always one to save my work often, I connected my PDA to my computer and saved my changes with about 2600 words written.

Let me pause the story here to tell you what I am writing this novel on. I am using my Palm Z22 PDA, my Palm keyboard, and word processing software called WordSmith. At the time I was using the trial version of the software, but I had paid for the full version and was only waiting for my registration code to arrive via e-mail. With this software I can write on my PDA and then have what I've written in a Word document on my PC when I go through the sync process.

Later that night I stopped at 9:30 with 5100 words written. I was very pleased that I had exceeded my goal, and connected my PDA to my computer again to backup the changes. This is when the problems started.

Three things occurred simultaneously in a trifecta of sorrow and woe. The first of these was that WordSmith was not done saving the document, and when I tried to sync it I received an error message. The second was that when I went back into the WordSmith software to make sure it was done saving, the trial ran out and I could only use it in read-only mode. The third was that I didn't look at the documents on the PDA vs the PC before attempting to sync it again.

My second sync worked, but when I reopened the document all my work from the late afternoon and evening were gone.

2500 words.

Fours hours worth of work.

Gone.

I sat and muttered some expletives. Then the e-mail came with my registration code, literally a minute too late.

The wife had gone out to a play that evening, and came home just as I was sitting back down to start re-typing what I had lost. As you might imagine my mood was black as treacle, but I was determined that I would restore those lost words before I went to bed that night. Working to recreate what I had written, I couldn't help thinking that what I was typing now was not as good as what I had done earlier. I was amused with my predilection to put those lost words on a literary pedestal, and just kept on typing. I finished at 1:30 am with the original 5100 words, and another hundred added on for good measure.

As my head hit my pillow I realized that Daylight Savings Time had ended and it was only 12:30 am. I smiled as I drifted off to sleep. I would need the extra hour of sleep since my goal for Sunday was another 3200 words.

My lessons learned from this debacle are as follows: First, (as the wife reminded me) backup my work after every writing session. If I get up for a 5-10 minute break I now backup the file on the PC. Second, (and this was also the wife's idea) do a Save As of the file to another name for each writing session. And third, slow down and think when mixing writing and technology. Hopefully by keeping these things in mind I won't have another problem.

So when you look at my word count total, remember the 2500 words that are not reflected there. Golden prose that lived only a few short hours, and then was lost forever. Farewell, we hardly knew ye.

NaNo Note: If you want an idea of what I am working on I have added an excerpt from my novel on my NaNoWriMo profile page. The website is kind of wonky, so if you can't get in now try again later.