May 16, 2021

Make a saving throw...

Sometimes tech just doesn’t play nice – or more accurately, I wasn’t vigilant. Part of the last two weeks has been devoted to expanding the Kermakkian culture that Jaysin is entering on his quest to find his brother Chasse. This involves:

1. Creating a geographical environment – places, weather, distances etc
2. Creating a socio-political context, including, in this case, a male-centric religious context (sound familiar?)
3. Creating an economy, this one driven by a slave economy
4. Creating a dynamic background ie a war somewhere distant
5. Creating another language – makes three so far for this series (not including dragon and arcane languages)

The above takes time and recording, which is where last week’s disaster comes in. The document I developed didn’t save, did it? Correction – I didn’t save the document. Rookie error. I get to start some of that work again. At least I can now improve on the original concepts.
 
I’ve been asked what I do to keep work safe during the writing process, especially as I create novels entirely on a digital device (ever since 1989!!). So, I write on a document stored on a cloud service that is saving constantly (except last week’s effort where I worked locally – doh!) At the close of every writing session, I also save the work to three backup hard drives – one on my device, one that acts as a time machine automatic backup and one on a separate hard drive. Basically, I need four sources to fail to lose work. I take one hard drive with me when I leave the house, in case the computer is ever stolen. And last week was proof that if you ever get distracted or don’t concentrate you can still lose work.

Way back in 1990, as I was developing the second novel in the Andrakis series on a MacSE, late one night, and I was less than a paragraph from the end of a chapter which I’d powered through from 9pm until 2am, the electricity shut down. I sat staring at the dark screen for several minutes, stunned, realising I’d instantly lost 3000 words of creativity, most of which would never be replicated. Lesson? Back in those days, I set the self-imposed and practised rule of saving at the end of every paragraph and every page, to a hard drive and onto the old floppy disks.

The current draft has moved close to 35,000 words. Jaysin’s character is being challenged by different events, currently leading to his entrapment and sale into slavery. This week’s aim is to help him escape his predicament. Again, I have several options:

• He finds a way to escape (most likely)
• One of his captors decides to aid him (very tempting storyline)
• Tam or Harmi or Chasse save him (highly unlikely)

I’ll play with each scenario and make a choice. He is coming to terms with his current limitations in the process, but he’s more determined than ever to find his brother. Time to save this blog.