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By Leslie, August 25, 2010 8:20 am

No, seriously, do you have one?

I had an out of body moment this morning. I lost the latest version of my manuscript. Sync services ate it.

I use a system for writing that involves two computers, SugarSync, and Scrivener among other programs. Now, I adore Scrivener. It allows me to manage my complex manuscript like the project it is. A Scrivener project is built around a package of individual text files indexed by the Scrivener application and presented in the UI as an integrated whole. There is a variety of metadata around each file that includes attributes like last changed, scene, status, or anything else you could possible imagine or create. It also allows you to take snapshots (i.e. versions) of any part of the project and save them so you can roll back if you decide that the outrageously brilliant plot twist involving slugs and penguins was just a wee bit too far out.

It also means that there are about a bazillion tiny files inside a Scrivener package. Not a big problem, unless you are syncing the files individually. Ahem.

Syncing between computers is hard. I’m certain of this because I’ve used a broad assortment of sync services over many years with little to no success. Man, it must be a freaking hard problem. But in the past couple of years, sites like SugarSync, Apple’s .Me, and DropBox all seem to have it working pretty well. Until it doesn’t, of course. And let me say here that I use all three services for different things.

That’s what happened to me today. I lost my latest version of my manuscript A Fault in Time in a sync collision that corrupted the Scrivener package. This is the manuscript that finaled in the contest, the one that an agent has requested. I said I had an out of body moment, because that’s what it was. An out of body moment.

I looked stupidly at the terrifying error message that told me my file was horribly corrupted.

I said, “*&%#”.

I launched Time Machine, restored the file, and kept working.

Total elapsed time lost….about 20 seconds. (Ignoring the time to blog about it.)

Total data lost….nothing.

What’s your backup strategy? Have you tested it lately?

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By Leslie, June 22, 2010 7:25 am

I just paid my yearly tithe to Audible.com.  Yes, I admit it, I am an audiobook junkie.  I do housework, exercise, walk the dog and do the dishes all to the strains of my favorite audiobooks. My family are all Pandora and Shazaam junkies. My iPods don’t have any music on them, pure audiobooks.

So as I’ve been editing A Fault in Time, The Box, my short stories and the Weekly SavvyAuthors.Com Newsletter, I began to think.  My best line edits come when the computers read my words back to me. I follow along on my iPad or hardcopy and make notes. I can’t skip or read what I mean to write but actually didn’t. But this ties me to the computer. It’s summer! I want to be digging in the dirt!  What if I could convert my entire mss to an AAC file, an audiobook file?

Well I can, and it’s changed my life. At least my editing life.

What I wanted was a tool that would let me create an AAC file, import that into iTunes and play on my iPod so I can immerse myself in my own writing in my favorite way. And most importantly the way that will not let me skip words or read what I intended to write rather than what I actually wrote. I can check for pacing, redundancy and crappy sentence structure. Those pre-fab voices are also real sticklers when it comes to grammar. lol. The voices are flat and pretty montone so it’s really all about your words. Do they work do they flow?

There are a number of applications that will speak words back to you. I’m on  a Mac, so Mac OS also does this.

GhostReader by ConvenienceWare is my choice, and at $39.95 for a full license is a pretty nice tool. They also have a 15 day trial that works in a nifty way: 15 days that you actually use the application not 15 days from installation!

On the iPad or iPod SpeakIt is an amazing little tool.  I can import an entire manuscript and choose a reasonable voice and let ‘er rip.  But I cannot create a file of more than 1000 words.  8(

Well, I’m off to edit…while I pull weeds. Ta!

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By Leslie, May 29, 2010 3:50 pm

I am a tool

But a damn sharp one. And today I rounded that most wonderful of goals Draft 4 success.

San Francisco….now called A Fault in Time (catchy, eh?) is complete in fourth draft and approaching query readiness. OMFG.

Nearly ready does not mean ready. Oh my lordy no. I have not angsted over this puppy enough. Want to know how I know? Look at the colors on the image to your left. See all the greens, oranges and dark blues? Those are scenes that are in 4th, 5th and even above! Nicely polished happy scene-lets.

Pink is a lowly second draft and bright blue is third. So! while the overall story is complete in the fourth draft I have some scene-lets that I’ve recently added. Some are very small transitions to fill plot details and some reflect changes that I made when I turned one of my characters a little bit darker.

But I keep track of them so I know what has been really edited well and what words are still pretty fresh and crunchy.

I am still wildly happy about this, because this kind of editing goes pretty quickly for me. We’ll see what the beta readers say.

lol.

So what the hell is a scene-let? I’ts not a true scene, but I break out action in a finer granularity, makes it easier for me to write. Not a true scene in the Robert McKee screenwriting defintion. In fact, I guess mine are actually beats, but I hate to use that because it has other means as well. Sigh, overloaded terms.

“Scene”: A group of beats which result in an action through conflict in continuous time and space that turns the lives of the characters around into another direction.

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By Leslie, May 28, 2010 9:06 am

A definition.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Procrastination…

procrastination, n.

1. The action or habit of postponing or putting something off; delay, dilatoriness.
Often with the sense of deferring though indecision, when early action would have been preferable.

2. The postponing or deferring of something. Obs.

Leslie defines Procrastination as

1. The fiddling around with the new iPad, playing with bluetooth keyboardiness and rearranging the applets.

2. The adding to and editing of the soon to be wildly famous Dow Humous Genre decision tree. haha.

3. The adding to of the detritus in the blogosphere of posts, like this, that are really not worth writing and merely take up the valuable bandwidth that AT&T has finally decided she is allowed to have. grrr

4. The not writing of, and thus not finishing and readying for query a fault in time which she is supposed to be doing RIGHT NOW.

…..

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By Leslie, May 6, 2010 3:20 pm

On my path to completing San Francisco,  I am re-reading Robert McKee’s Story Substance and Structure. Actually, both reading and listening on audiobook, but that is just me. I’ve come to a point in my editing where I need to step back, once again, and look at the story structure.  This is not the terrifying word-ripping of January, this is more introspective. I’m asking questions like:

• What is the theme of this story? What has my subconscious been saying.
• Why are these characters doing these things? Does it make sense?
• Why did I chose to write this story?

In the words of Robert McKee, I’m looking for my controlling idea.  McKee says that you can only do this when you have written a draft through to the climax, and I understand why. It’s because the subconscious writer in you is laying out the theme.  You can only recognize that work with some distance and volume. This is McKee’s take on the controlling idea:

What value, positively or negatively charged, is brought into your main characters lives in the climax scene of the story and what is the chief force, cause or means that brings this value forward?

He suggests that you identify the value in the climax and then go back to the beginning of the story and find out  what force is working on that value. He means human values like love, family, treachery, hubris, greed, and betrayal. Think biblically, your subconscious is. You write in a single sentence that concept and tape it to the front of your monitor and do not edit another scene without thinking about how those changes will color or change that statement.

This makes so much sense to me. As I have been wrestled with this fourth draft, it’s the scenes that fall outside of the controlling idea that caused problems. Now I know why, it’s because I strayed.

What is the controlling idea for San francisco….? I’m not telling. But I will say that when I found it, I was a little puzzled, then after a long walk, not at all.