Sunday 30 November 2008

Pic of the day: Let us just leave alone the fact that I did not make a backup to a separate hard disk, even though I have several of these on my home network at any time. How was I to know that something would go wrong?

Losing NaNoWriMo

That would be the National Novel Writing Month. And it may even be the last year this creative stampede is about in its current form. This year, the number of parasites was so much higher than the number of people who actually paid for using the website, that it runs a deficit. Not even enough to pay the bills for this year, much less keep the servers running and do it again next year. Shame. (Despite what it may look like, I paid my small amount. I just did not understand the instructions for getting it associated with my account name.)

In any case, I lost. And very suddenly, in a manner of speaking. It was on the 12th, and I was close to halfway on my novel about the young man who drowned and was brought back to life in the magical world of Arcanus (of Master of Magic strategy game fame, although there is no reference to the game in the novel. Was no reference). I decided to create a new "project" (the word yWriter uses for books) so I could start writing down some ideas for another story instead of having them floating around in my head. There is only so much head, especially as we grow older. So I ran the "new project wizard" and put down various notes for the new book. A few hours later I returned to my old novel and it was gone. So were the daily backups from November 2 onward.

I think it is pretty obvious that it was the New Project Wizard that killed them off, although I can't prove anything. I also upgraded Windows XP to service pack 3 in the meantime, but nothing else has gone missing, only my novel. The daily backups were stored in separate subfolders under the main folder for the novel. The new project was in a completely different folder again. How the program knew to delete the backups is beyond my comprehension, it is not a meaningful feature and even if it was, it would presumably remove ALL the backups instead of letting the first two stay as if to taunt me.

After that, I have written some here and some there on a couple new stories. But I have not even tried to write 50 000 words. I used up my wrist and my throat the first 12 days anyway, I would at best be able to keep the normal pace. Writing twice as much was out of the question. Even if I had twice as much to write. But my muse went home, as well she could after being treated like that. Still, I like the new story better in some ways. And I got to play a lot of City of Heroes.