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?

For new readers, A Fault in Time is the work in progress that was started in a LibertyHall MidSommerMadness camp last summer, achieved first drafty status in 2009 NaNoWriMo, and has been my baby and albatross through FIVE..(5) full, bottom to top revisions.  You cannot say that I am shy about taking a weedwhacker to my words. (hehe alliteration..I am feeling spunky).

So two weeks ago, much to my astonishment, I was told by Liz over at SavvyAuthors that my baby had made it to the final round. Whhhuuuuuttt? No shit?  And there was a lot more cussing and some hyperventilation.

The judges’ comments were useful, wonderful, and insightful and I felt truly happy! They liked it! They saw where it could be better! YAY!

So today, you could have nearly dumped me over with a fracking feather….A Fault in Time (OK, the name, she sucks.) won in her division. *&())()*(*(*@#$^  Lordy Lucy– and the agent who read it wants to see more? For real? Now I’m extremely grateful to this amazing person for wanting to look a my manuscript, and if this is as far as it goes, I will still be happy. Because I know that I have a shot. I really effing do.

Who knew?  Evidently my most amazing husband who just smiled and said, “Of course.”

One of Gladwell’s key premises in his popular book is:

When faced with an onslaught of information, only an expert has the prior knowledge that lets her weed out the confusing mess of important-looking but irrelevant chaff so she can focus on the one or two key bits the decision turns on.

His examples range from curators at the Getty museum who when faced with an expertly executed fake statue failed initially to see it as a fake, to overwrought doctors trying to decide the fate of possible cardiac patients in a inner city hospital in Chicago. He walks us through the dilemma faced by police officers with milliseconds to decide if the dark object in a young man’s hand is a gun or a wallet.

It’s interesting stuff. And the parallels to the current crisis in the publishing industry were obvious.  According to Gladwell’s experts, the key factor between making the correct split second decision, the right blink, is the amount of good, no excellent, prior information and research you have internalized or a willingness to follow a set of triage instructions and not waver in the face of conflicting information. The cardiac physicians who used the apparently simple triage rules, ignoring the rest of the symptoms, had patients with better results. The art experts with years of experience trusted their first glances of the statue and identified the fake, but only because they backed it with deep knowledge.

Gladwell found when inexperienced people trusted their initial judgments, or blinks, preconceived results based on bias ruled. Decisions often went awry.

The publishing industry is in crisis and not just from the threat of ebook readers. Personal computers, the internet and easy access to just about anyone makes it seem like anyone can write and publish a book. Just do google search! Slush readers who twenty years ago would get a handful of manuscripts  a week to slog through for an editor or agent are receiving, in some cases, hundreds each day. Agent backlogs are months long.

How are these querys and first pages getting read? I bet they’re getting blinked. And in most cases the slush readers are likely experts and know what they are looking for. But some are getting blinked in an unknowable, inexpert way, as well. That’s just human nature and the internet firehose.

Since I am getting ready to query my first novel, this means that anything I can do to elevate myself above the slush pile is crtitical. You can work to gain access through contests and, pitch sessions at sites like SavvyAuthors or other writing sites. Producing squeaky clean pages and a tight query seems like a good starting point. Making sure my unique voice shines in my first pages, and the rest of my novel is one of my priorities, and improving my basic grammar and self-editing skills. I figure in a Blink world it’s all about not squandering any opportunity that drifts my way.

My husband and I both have iPads. He visited our oldest son a few weeks ago. Old Son does not have an iPad but is a technodweeb and lusts after all things shiny. I asked how he liked the husband’s iPad and there was a long hesitation in the chat window.

Mom: did u play w/ iPad?

.

.

OS:  no. iPad too personal. u know?

HUH? I had never thought of the iPad as more personal than any of the other devices he wrenched out of my hands to fondle nearly as soon as I unboxed them. Then I thought about it, inspected my iPad, and he’s kind of right.  But that goes along with my growing realization that the iPad is not bastardized/turbocharged webpad or a replacement for the MacBook Air. It’s a whole different class of device.

I use it to do some of the things I used to do on my phone like quickly look up contacts and news, and some of the things I used to cart my MacBook Air around the house for like control the sprinklers and the Apple TVs and look up arcane bits of info in IMDB. It stays by my bed so I can check my mail in the morning and it goes in my purse now, not my MacBook Air. And lets not forget all the recipes that I now have at the swipe of a greasy finger.  Oh…and the books!! But even then, I will choose to read on my light weight Kindle before dragging out the iPad.

The theme here is easy  and personalized data access from multiple sources delivered in a single device. That is true power.

If I’m going to do serious writing, the Air comes along. I’ve got a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad, but that’s silly, my Air is my writing device of choice anyway.

So, do I need the iPad? No, I guess not, but try to pry it out of my fingers now….  iPad….Personal Access Device

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!

A Fault in Time is getting very shiny. The real question is…

Am I polishing a fabulous, vintage 1964 Airstream Globetrotter trailer or a turd?

OK, to be fair it’s not an either/or question. It could be something in between. It could have a plot that is close and needs tweaking, or a great plot but be light on characterization. Or it could have great voice and lack detail, or….

“Last boarding call for the spiral staircase of doom to Obessoland.”

Yes, well. Harrumph.

The first set of beta readers get their mitts on it Sunday. Oh shit, that’s tomorrow. I expect that it will have problems since finding great crit partners has been one of the more challenging things I have attempted this year.

I am prepared for problems. I am prepared for rewrites. I am prepared to go to a coarser grit, take off the shiny top coat and rip into the subsurface to make this story right.

I’m willing to do whatever it takes. Bring. It. On.

Gulp.

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.

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.

…..

So while I scrape the moss from a amazingly wet winter off everything I own, I’m making a list of the things I am going to do this summer:

1. Camp in my Airstream Trailer. Yes, Yes Yes!!!! No phone, no interwebs just me and a huge slabs of granite, a  remodeled trailer kitchen, and my computer for week(s) of writerly productivity. OK, Chris (the DH) can come too. And maybe the kid. If he’s good.
2. Pen my YA SciFi in the June SavvyAuthors Boot Camp with my friends in the Savvy OR! 30 days or Bust!
3. Query what was called San Francisco, and is now called A Fault in Time to my list of agents.  OMG its nearly ready – who knew!!! All growed up and has a name, even!
4. Walk my neurotic dog, Kyra, every day. Yes, damnit EVERY DAY. slacker….
5. Tend to my house.  I’ve been in a writer’s frenzy and well, lets just say it could use some tending. But hey, I’ve nearly FINISHED  a book that is queryable!!!
6. Kayak with aforementioned nutty dog.
7. Streamline the Newsletter production for the SavvyAuthors.Com Newsletter – I’m the editor.
8. Read many, many, many books.
9. Write and submit more Flash!
10. sleep.

It even has a much better title than San Francisco. I’m sure that title will change, but still.

I edited the first three chapters and the climax chapter again and realized it’s really ALMOST DONE. Wow.

I’m not saying it’s War and Peace or anything, but:

• the main plot and the sub-plot weave together and resolve in the climax.
• the antagonist character is real and I feel for her, and actually wish she could win
• I hurt a little for each and every whore
• I think the choices that my two MCs make are the best ones, but not the easiest
• I think the resolution is a little unexpected
• I don’t think I left any dangly bits (OK we’ll see about that)

Now it’s time to man up and put down the polish, right after I look at just a couple more chapters…..