Has this ever happened to you?
You revise your manuscript, adding a new and important scene that drives or improves the plot in a truly significant way and then SOMEhow it gets lost in the MILLIONS of versions of your manuscript floating around in your hard drive.
I am not the most organized person around, but really, this is ridiculous!
It all started with the dropbox. My saintishly-tolerant husband suggested I save my mss in this dropbox thingy so that if the computer crashes I'll still have it. Plus, I wouldn't have to be emailing the thing to myself every few days.
Great idea (He is full of them). So I did. But-- here's where the law of unintended consequences comes into play-- I got all tangled up, saving some versions in my traditional documents file and some in the snazzy new dropbox and now, I've lost the version that has the cool new scene.
....Either that or I dreamed that I wrote the cool new scene (which seemed to solve all the weaknesses and warts in the manuscript....hmmmm......) That's possible too. It's been a sort of bleary summer.
Officially, I'm on version number 31 of Family, Genius, Species. Although there have been many more less radical alterations and edits along the way. I need a better system, clearly.
How do you organize your drafts?
2 comments:
Oh that kinda blows. I wish I had a solution for you.
Right now I don't have the best system to organizing my drafts. Each WIP has it's own folder. In there are multiple subfolders. One entitled Versions. That's where all my old drafts go. The current one stays in the main folder.
That is a bummer. We lost all kinds of important stuff during our last computer crash and burn. Finally, we went all Mac with a Time Machine backup and nothing has happened since.
I only focus on one writing project at a time so I keep rewriting and replacing my original draft. But I do have some earlier copies I name "old draft #1" with the date to help me remember.
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