Okay, I'm still getting a hang of this "waking up early to have an hour of me time" thing, but I think I'm enjoying it. Don't get me wrong, I don't enjoy it at 5:15 each morning, but I never regret getting out of bed, so I'm calling this a win.
As you might know, a middle grade story has been lodged in my cranium for years. I've written the story, tried to re-write the story, worked on new scenes for the story, and have Donald Maass'ed the story to within an inch of my life (no, Donald Maass'ed is not a verb and yes, I may be exaggerating just a tad.)
When I switched jobs, I switched computers, moved folders on to jump drives, DropBox, and CDs. Then I fired up Google apps and put some docs in my Google Drive. Then all my creative juices were sucked right out of me and everything sat and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Like, for eight freaking months waited.
Last week, I started going through it all. I sorted my desktop folders, made my notes, bought totally unnecessary amounts of Perfect Blue Writing Pens and stickies, and with a hearty gulp of strong coffee, decided to dive right in. Just then it all came crashing back. The reason why I stopped. Staring back at me was the mountain I didn't want to climb all those months ago.
You see, in all my editing / proofing / new idea trying insanity last Sept, Oct, and Nov, I thought it would be smart to make a copy of my story. Let's call that one Master Draft 6. But somewhere along the way, I added All The Amazing Things to Master Draft 5 before removing All The Extra Crappy Things to MD6.
MD5 stats: 243 pages and 68,896 words
MD6 stats: 205 pages and 57,875 words
My next step is to figure out which one to use. I'm strongly considering paying our summer student employee cash under the table to go through and highlight the differences. Does that make me a lazy writer? Yeah, I thought so.
Versioning control, 1 -- Tricia, 0.
I'd pay him! That is a lot of work. Wonder if there's a way to get Word to find the differences?
ReplyDeleteIt is a lot of work, which is why I'm trying to find the work-around! :) I was just going to say how I imagine there's a way to do this in Word but that I don't know it. But Seabrooke's email below seems to clear that right up!
DeleteSo awesome to have you back! Now and then I'd wonder what you were up to, it's been a while. Hope the new(ish) job has been going well and stuff. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd also great you're writing again! I really miss writing when I don't for a while, and then when I finally get back to drafting/revising/whatever again it feels so delicious. Kinda frustrating to be faced with that sort of dauntingness with the WIP, though.
You can do a compare documents in Word, eh? And it'll highlight all the changes (and the nature of the changes) for you. In Word, go to Review > Compare > Compare (that's the order in the 2007 version; it'd be something similar in earlier versions, though). And it'll prompt you for the two files you want to compare, and which one you want to consider the original (for the purposes of showing the nature of the change - whether it shows as a deletion or insertion, etc).
Hi! It's good to be back, though I'm not sure I'd say "back". It's more like I'm dipping my toes in the water. :) I hope to get 2 more blog posts in the queue this weekend.
DeleteThanks for the tip on comparing docs! I will sit down this weekend and try it. I'm pretty sure I know where the major differences are, but this will give me solid answers. Thank you!
Dang! Why didn't I think of putting our interns to work this way? Genius. Good luck with revisions. It's always been a pain in the booty for me but so necessary.
ReplyDeleteJust think of all the work we could get done if we had interns running around for us! SO MUCH WORK!
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