On Tracking Your Work

I've written a few times that I work best under a deadline. Deadlines are awesome. They focus the creative mind wonderfully. An author without a deadline can pick at their work and keep polishing it until they're old and gray. An author with a deadline mailed their manuscript out at 11:59 p.m. last night, and got a receipt so they can prove it when rabid wolverines devour their work halfway to the publisher.

The only problem with deadlines is that they need to be... toothy. Bitey. A deadline set by an outside agency is a ravenous monster that will eat you for your failures. And they can smell failure. But a deadline you set yourself can be more of a tame pet. You can stroke it, give it a few treats, scratch its ears, and before you know it you're two months behind and your deadline is fat and sleeping on your sofa.

This is not helpful.

I've been trying to reckon a way around this problem for awhile now. My first instinct was to go the NaNoWriMo, Stephen King, every-damn-writer-who's-written-a-book-on-writing route: set a word count every day, meet it, repeat. And that worked. For a bit.

"Authors live or die by their word count." I'm certain somebody's said that at some point. And if you're a full time writer it's true. Every word you write is another nickel* in your pocket to, say, pay your rent, or buy that medicine for your sick kid, or, y'know, eat.

So I respect the word count. 1,000 words a day, 1,667 words a day, 2,000 words a day, whatever target you can reasonably shoot for, go for it! And when I'm writing a first draft I'll go for my own target (1,000 words per day). It's respectable. It's The Tradition.

But let me ask you something, if you happen to be a writer out there.

What about all the work that doesn't include a word count? What about sketching out a map of some Godforsaken island your story takes place on? What about figuring out the names and backgrounds of that pantheon your protagonist worships? What about the hour you spent in a library (oh let's be honest, on Wikipedia) digging up names from some obscure language so everything sounds like it fits? What about the photos you pulled off of TMZ so you know what your cast looks like?

What about the stuff that only gives you a piddling little word count? Outlining, jotting notes on index cards and pasting them to a wall? Hell, how about the time you spend staring at said wall and rearranging those fucking cards? (Bob gets to Chicago here, but he meets the Mayor here, and that can't happen under the laws of physics so he has to fall in love here, and that means his car breaks down just outside of Chicago and I have to introduce a rabid wolverine here...)

In short, a fair amount of the work in writing isn't measurable by word count. The majority is, absolutely, but not all of it. And if you try to measure your work solely by word count, you're going to write a first draft in a very respectable amount of time and then end up feeling at loose ends, feeling like you're not getting anything done, when you find yourself facing the editing process. I know, I've done it.

So I've refactored my goal setting. Rather than track my daily word count, I pick a goal every night before I go to bed. If I'm writing, it'll be a word count. If I'm editing, maybe it'll be a page count to review. If I'm outlining, I'll set a chapter count to summarize, or pick a chapter and break it down by scene. If I'm brainstorming, I'll pick something I want to flesh out and... well, flesh it out.

The point is to set a goal I can mark as Done or Not Done, every day, and then get it done. Then get it done the next day. And the next day. And the next day, too. Pretty soon you've got a Seinfeld calendar going and all you've got to do is avoid breaking the chain. I keep mine on my Google calendar.

I broke the chain a few times.

Am I overthinking this? Maybe. But I'm getting more writing done, too, so I'll live with it. Now excuse me, I need to get this rabid wolverine off my leg.

*I suspect I'm inflating the figure here.

Night Writing and Unexpected Victories

So this is a weird post. See, a few days ago I tweeted this:

And that attracted the attention of Nick Kyme, author and all around good guy (also the first editor I ever worked with, in conjunction with Alex Davis). Nick used the tweet as the jumping off point for a rather nice blog post about his writing habits.

Nick is a morning writer by preference. I'm usually most productive at night, after my wife has gone to bed and I've walked the dog. The house is quiet, I don't have any chores left to do, and I can pop something on for background noise and go to it. (A movie I've seen repeatedly with a lot of narration can be excellent for this: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Goodfellas work well for me. Music also works well depending on my mood, but podcasts are a bad idea.)

I can write in the morning, if I'm up early and I've had enough sleep and I'm not at work. These factors rarely line up well for me, but when they do I can get a good amount of words down before lunch and still be up for a second session later in the day.

Afternoon writing rarely works for me. Life likes to keep me busy in the afternoon, and if I'm running errands or visiting friends or cleaning house, I'm obviously not writing. Worse, knowing that I'm going to do these things a half hour or even an hour in advance acts like writer's block for me; instead of getting words on paper (or into Scrivener) I'll piddle around with other things until it's time to go.

Conversely, I love to write right before a meeting, or in a waiting room. Give me an uncomfortable chair, a notepad, a pen, and a few strangers and I can knock out a few hundred words with ease.

So broadly my schedule is do most of my writing at night, and get a few words in where I can the rest of the day. If I hit my target (usually 1,000 words, if NaNoWriMo isn't on) early, I'll let myself have the evening off, unless I've got a scene I'm looking forward to in the queue.

But that's all beside the point of my tweet, which is that fatigue ate the last few hundred words in my quota one night. Believe it or not, this doesn't happen all that often. Either I'll make my word count (good), or I'll come to a grinding halt trying to hit my word count well before I actually fall asleep on my keyboard. This is usually accompanied by repeatedly browsing useless websites, checking my manuscript, and then going back to the useless websites again. I guess you could consider it creative fatigue (or just having too many distractions, if hitting the router with a hammer stops it - but it doesn't always).

When I find myself at a dead stop, sometimes I'll switch to a different scene to jar loose a few thoughts. If I can't do that for some reason, I'll just jot down a few extra words to get myself to a good stopping point.

Today was one of the latter cases. I'd just finished writing the climactic final battle of the book, and wanted to be able to say I was done with the first draft, today, no messing around. But I had an epilogue chapter planned that would wrap up loose ends with most of the extended cast and see the main character set out for more adventures...

...and I'm getting fatigued again just writing that. I wasn't going to get the whole chapter down. So to let myself say I was satisfied with the day's work, I wrote just enough to establish that the main character was alive and safe, if a bit banged up. I had him say good night, I had his potential love interest say good night...

...and then for no reason I wrote the biggest Wham Line of the whole book for the last sentence. Totally unplanned on my part. And the damn thing works, much better than a lengthy closing chapter could have.

Fatigue: it's not always a bad thing.

And that's all a roundabout way of saying that I managed to finish the first draft of my NaNoNovel in just under two and a half months. 80,000 words as it stands, with a fair bit of expansion likely as I flesh out descriptions, move scenes around, and try to turn the slog of a plot into something a bit more interesting. I don't even want to try and predict how long that's going to take, but I find I'm looking forward to it more than usual (read: not at all) this time.

Fetch the red pen of doom, and let us away!

Triage! Recovering Scrivener Files From Dropbox or Google Drive Errors

There is nothing worse than writing tens, hundreds, or thousands of words and then losing all of that work.

A while back I did a comparison of Google Drive and Dropbox, and briefly discussed the issues you can run into with Scrivener, the writer's fancy-pants friend. I didn't really focus on Scrivener because I was comparing cloud storage solutions (and I really should take a look at SkyDrive sometime I suppose, now that I'm running Windows 8).

Anyway, reader Chaim recently got in touch with me to ask for help. He was using Scrivener with Google Drive, and somehow his work across two computers got out of sync. The result? Lost work.

I've had the same thing happen to me more than once working with Scrivener on Dropbox. It's a problem that afflicts anyone using Scrivener with either cloud product. And it sucks. Simply put, you must make sure that you've closed out of Scrivener and let your project sync to the cloud before you open it on any other computer. Period. If you don't, your project file will get screwed up and you will appear to lose work.

I say appear because, hey! All is not lost. And I'm here to walk you through getting your files back.

Step 1: First, copy your Scrivener project out of your cloud storage and onto another location on your local computer. This is like isolating a crime scene, or quarantining a patient: you don't want Dropbox or Google Drive to do any more futzing with your files while you're trying to recover your writing. Scrivener stores projects in a folder with the .scriv extension (on Macs this will look like a file, but trust me, it's a folder). This is what you need to copy somewhere - your Desktop will work just fine.

Step 2: Next you need to open the .scriv folder and take a look at its ooey-gooey contents. On Windows this just means opening the folder. On a Mac, you'll need to change the folder name and get rid of the .scriv extension, so the operating system will know to treat it as a folder instead of a file.

Either way, once you're inside the folder you want to look for the Files folder. Open that, then open the Docs folder inside it. You'll be greet with a big old list of numbered RTF files. (RTF is like a Word document's handicapped cousin.) These are where Scrivener stores all of your writing... and odds are that writing you "lost" is still there, even if Scrivener can't see it.*

Open up the RTFs, one by one, and look for your lost writing. If one of the RTFs is labeled "conflicted" or otherwise numbered oddly, that's probably the one with the missing text. Once you've found it, open up your original Scrivener project (the one that's still in your cloud storage folder) and paste the missing text in. Voila, done! This is what worked for Chaim, and hopefully it worked for you too. If not, move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Is your text not in the RTFs? Then it's time to check your patient history... I mean backups. One handy feature of Scrivener is that it automatically backs up the last five copies of your project file for you, by default. The problem is that it can be hard to find out where Scrivener is storing the backups if you just go looking for them. Fortunately, Scrivener has made this easy for you.

Open your project and select the "Tools" dropdown at the top menu, then "Options...". Click the "Backup" tab in the window that opens up. Along with some other options, you'll see your backup location and a button that says "Open backup folder...". Press the button and voila! Backups.

Now, with any luck you'll see a ZIP file named after your project. Copy the most recent one to a convenient location and unzip it. Then, open the unzipped project in Scrivener and look for your lost text. If all is well, you'll see it. If not, you'll want to go to Step 4.

Step 4: At this point your lost work isn't in your current project or your backups, and it's time to get serious. Get out your scalpel, fire up your web browser and browse to your cloud storage solution's website. We're going to check your version control system.

What's version control? Basically, when you save changes to a file to the cloud, Google Drive and Dropbox will both keep the previous version of the file for 30 days (by default; you can pay to extend this to life). If you make an error ("Whoops! I deleted 3,000 words and hit the Save button by accident!"), you can pull up the previous version and recover your work. The details vary between Google Drive and Dropbox, so look them up in their respective manuals.

What if you don't save that often? Well, Scrivener is your friend here too. It has an auto-save feature that fires off every two seconds, to keep your work up to date. If you're editing your project while you're hooked up to the cloud (i.e. you have an Internet connection), you're fine. If not, well... maybe go back to Step 2 and take another look?

Hopefully by this point you've got your work back (voila!), so let's consider leading a healthy lifestyle for a moment, and move back to...

Step 5: Backups. As nice as Scrivener's default backup configuration is, you can and should be able to do better, especially if you're using cloud storage already.

Open up the Backup window again and take a look at the options. First, make sure "Turn on automatic backup" is checked! Then, tell Scrivener when to back up your work. I use "Backup on project close", but if you're paranoid you can select "Backup with each manual save". I also like to compress my backups into ZIP files and add the date to backup file names, just in case I need an easy time stamp reference to some colossal revision effort.

Finally, there's the big two options I recommend. First, for the "Retain backup files:" option, I recommend keeping ALL of your backups in perpetuity. For modern computers the space cost isn't going to be a big deal, and you might be grateful for the option to look back at your work months later (say, if you want to harvest a discarded character for some new project).

Second, create a folder in your Dropbox or Google Drive for your Scrivener backups, and change your "Backup location:" option to point to that folder. You should only have to do this once, although if you work on both Mac and Windows computers, you will have to do it twice. I'd also recommend using a separate backup folder for Windows and Mac under those circumstances. I don't know that the different operating systems will clobber each other, but I also don't like to take chances.

Once more, voila! You now have a Scrivener configuration that will silently back up all of your work to a separate folder, time stamp every backup, and upload them to the cloud one by one. Your work should have a long and healthy life - but maybe hook an automated backup drive to one of your computers, too. Just in case.

Hopefully you've found this useful. If you've got any other tips on how to keep your writing safe, post a comment and share!

*The dirty details: Scrivener uses a .scrivx project file to tell it which RTFs contain what text. If your .scrivx folder gets screwed up during a cloud storage sync, Scrivener won't be able to "see" the file, even though the actual RTF is probably still there. As far as I can tell this is the most common file syncing error that Scrivener runs into.

Final Report 2012

Still not dead!

So, okay. I did succeed at NaNoWriMo this year. I haven't mentioned anything about it since n'yeah because I'm still not done with the book yet, which is how it should be. I'm currently at 70,000 words, give or take, and steaming on to the big final battle.

I'm going to keep writing through 2013, of course. I want to finish and then revise the NaNoNovel, and then I think I'm going to work on my short story game. I would like to submit a few complete stories this year, whether or not they get published.

I had a very lovely Christmas holiday which consisted of visiting family and talking and generally being happy. I go back to work tomorrow, then I'm off again for New Year's Day, then I'm back to work for real. My resolution for the year at the office is to manage my timekeeping properly and to avoid any psychotic episodes.

What else did I do this year? Oh that's right, I bought a house and moved into it, which still leaves me feeling bewildered every once in a while. I am proud to report that my home feels like home, and now that I'm settled in I don't think I'd trade it for any other house in the world, rickety fence and all. Next year will  bring more surprises, and if they're as nice as this one has been I'll look forward to them.

I paid attention to politics more than ever this year, and now my heart is full of hate. 'Nuff said. But I'm glad Obama won.

And now because I wasn't really planning a recap of my year when I sat down I'll do some easy product shilling.

I read some great books, I read some good books, I read some okay books. I don't think I've read any truly bad books this year, which is not a terrible thing. No Know Fear was a spectacular highlight for the generally fantastic Horus Heresy series, while Betrayer left me feeling completely frazzled (in a good way). Let's Pretend This Never Happened made me laugh, and I got some warm fuzzies rereading classics like Heir to the Empire and The Hobbit.

I'm planning to read through The Silmarillion this year. All of it. I might write more about that later, but I suspect there's nothing more terrifying a man can do when he's trying to write his own epic (or any) fantasy book. I also might write more about Ravenwing, which was a very well-written book that still had me loathing most of the cast well before the halfway point.

I have fallen in love with Two Best Friends Play!, and maintained my adoration for The Mike O'Meara Show and The Big O and Dukes. The one upside to an hour-long commute is that I can keep up with my favorite podcasts without too much trouble. I would also recommend Nerd Poker to anyone who wants to listen to a filthy Dungeons & Dragons podcast from professional comedian Brian Posehn.

I've kept up with big changes in the comic book industry, but I'm sad to say that next year will probably see me cut back on my comics reading considerably, if I don't drop it entirely. I can't afford the price and the storage space to keep up with every Earth Shattering Event (tm) that comes down the pipe. With that said, I'm going to try to keep up with Saga and Transformers: Regeneration One, at the very least; and I'm very curious to see what Dan Slott has planned for the Superior Spider-Man.

I still play video games when I can, though I rarely have enough time to get serious with them. I got my first Call of Duty game for Christmas, and I'm curious to see if my Battlefield skillz transfer over. And I'm bound and determined to get Sarah on board for a Lego Lord of the Rings playthrough.

I'm not deeply committed to a lot of television shows. I'll be watching Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones, and the finale of Breaking Bad. I'll also try to keep up with The Walking Dead, which is more difficult than I'd like. For movies, I'm looking forward to the Evil Dead remake and trying to stay optimistic about World War Z. I'll take the rest as they come. There were a lot of good movies out this year, so suffice to say The Avengers was my favorite.

Have I shilled enough yet? Do I get a check from Google or Amazon now? God this was disjointed...

I'm Going To Say This Once

I've been almost silent online about the Sandy Hook shootings. I haven't felt it's my place to comment. It was a horrific tragedy and I'm unlikely to say anything that would reach or provide comfort to anyone affected by it. (If by some chance this post does reach anyone affected by a school shooting, you have my deepest condolences.)

But as time has passed and people have started debating how we can prevent this sort of tragedy from happening again, I've been tempted more than once to get into an argument over opinions I disagree with. And, again, I've refrained, because frankly I'm not interested in getting in a meaningless fight that'll piss me off, piss somebody I like off, and end with acrimony and nothing useful coming out of it.

Then I read the NRA statement that came out yesterday, and decided that yes, I need to write something about this.

For the record, I support the Second Amendment and I'm in favor of responsible gun ownership. I have a lot of hunters in my family, who've owned guns for years (hell, generations) without incident. I was, in high school, a member of the Annapolis High School NJROTC's Rifle Team for four years, headed* the damn thing for two, and earned an Expert marksmanship medal. (And my dad likely still wouldn't trust me with a rifle in the woods. I'm not going to argue with him.) I like guns and I think they're a fine thing for sportsmen and hunters to become familiar with.

With that said… I part company with the NRA in a lot of ways. I'm not sold on the idea of owning a gun for home defense: making said gun accessible enough to be useful means that it's not locked up well enough for me to feel secure having it in the house. I don't have anything against gun control in the practical aspects: I'm fine with more background checks, I don't care what size my ammunition clip is, and I can imagine a few semi-automatic weapons** that nobody really needs to own, at least without providing significant proof that they're competent enough to handle the weapon.

Now, I didn't expect the NRA to come out in favor of gun control. But I thought they might at least acknowledge that there is a debate to be had on the issue. I was, of course, thinking of the NRA of the actor Charlton Heston, and not the somewhat more batshit one of Wayne LaPierre.

Here is the full NRA statement for your reading convenience. It starts off on a strong note, acknowledging the tragedy and the NRA's silence up until now out of respect for the victims. But then it veers over a fucking cliff and demonizes the media, the mentally ill, the media, video games, Hollywood, the media, the President, and the media amid calls to put an armed guard in every school in the country.

Um… what?

Let's start with the main point, which is the armed guard thing. A lot of schools in America already have armed guards on the property, and I'm sad to say that they don't always prevent mass shootings. Columbine is one example. Fort Hood, a military base, could be considered another. There's also the fact that it would cost billions of dollars to keep enough guards employed to do a job that, thankfully, doesn't actually need to be done all that often.

And maybe it's just me, but I'm miserable about the state of schools in this country as it is. I don't like the idea that we need to put guards and metal detectors in schools to keep them from exploding with violence. School, particularly middle school, already felt like a damn prison half the time when I was attending. I don't want to send my future children to some place with the look and feel of Blackgate.

So I'm not in favor of more guards. There was also an implication in the statement that we should start a national registry for people with mental illnesses. It's a vague idea to start with, and I'd tend to oppose it on the grounds that it would be open to abuse by employers, neighborhood communities, and anyone else who got access to it. It also doesn't actually do anything to treat mental illness.

I think that improving mental illness treatment across the country ought to be a priority now, in addition to taking a serious look at gun control. None of the gun control measures I noted above, for example, would have done a damn thing to stop Adam Lanza, who stole a gun from his mother and shot her with it before he went on his rampage. Getting Lanza into treatment earlier might have stopped him before he started. Then again, a gun safe might have done the same thing.

What we don't need to do is get another Inquisition started against the "callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry" that makes video games. Nor do I give one shit about "Splatterdays" or the race to the bottom of "media conglomerates". (Well, I do give a small shit about that last one, but Jersey Shore has been canceled.)

The entertainment industries get trotted out as whipping boys at least once a decade to answer for the crimes of mentally ill people who might have had a passing familiarity with some violent game or show. The evidence of any actual influence is always spotty at best. (There's also the First Amendment issue, which Penny Arcade covered much more eloquently than I could, per the image above.)

And it's fairly obvious that Wayne is bringing up the evils of media to deflect attention from the NRA. Why else would he keep talking about how the media is "rewarding" killers, concealing "dirty little truths", and working to "demonize legitimate gun owners"? He's trying to make it as clear as possible that the media ought to be concentrating on MTV and >snerk< Bulletstorm, and that anyone talking about the NRA is flagrantly biased against it.

Which is, to be fair, his job. But it's not in the country's best interests to pretend that we don't even need to have a debate about gun control. And it's a farce to paint the NRA as an embattled organization being assaulted on all sides.

Gun control needs to be on the table. So does providing better treatment for mental illness. I don't agree with putting more armed guards in schools, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it. Wayne said it himself: "there is no national, one-size-fits-all solution to protecting our children." We have a very clear problem that our leaders need to address: I encourage them to do so quickly and thoughtfully.

What we should not do is let the NRA or any other lobby put their interests before the interests of the citizens of our country. We should not let pundits and lobbyists spread disinformation, anger and bullshit to cripple even the most common-sense regulation. We should not let a desire for austerity prevent us from funding programs that have can prevent future tragedies and improve the lives of American citizens. Above all else, we shouldn't let this become yet another partisan exercise to score points for the next election.

We have an opportunity, in the face of this shooting, to take real actions to prevent future tragedies. Those actions won't be perfect; they can't be. But we can't afford to let the NRA keep us from taking any action at all.

I'm going to ask you, if you haven't already, to contact your Senators and your Representative, and urge them to act. I'm not going to be particular on what you urge them to do; as I've said, no one solution is perfect. But an imperfect solution is still better than failing to address the problem.

* In reality I was a figurehead. The program was run by Mrs. Miller, a parent volunteer who brooked no trespass of the range safety rules, i.e using a student's head as a gun rest. I salute her both for keeping us competitive and for ensuring that we suffered no injuries.

** Ignore anyone who talks about an "assault weapons ban" without qualifying what they mean. The term is ill-defined bullshit that can cover automatic weapons (which are already heavily restricted) and semi-automatic weapons (which covers any gun that doesn't require you to chamber each round by hand - that is to say, the vast majority of them).