Aargh, oops
Sep. 11th, 2012 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo there I was, writing stuffs; and there were my feet, kicking apart the cable to the monitor. Sudden black screen, whoops. So I dived under the desk and plugged the bits back together again - and came up to ongoing black screen, not going to resume its proper labour, no. Nothing I could do, apparently, it wasn't going to listen to the computer, not going to do what that said, uh-uh. In the end I had to reboot.
And the document I'd been working on, when I went to restore it? Was blank. Had wiped itself entirely, do not ask me how or why. So I had to restore from a back-up, which didn't include any of the work I'd done today. (This may be the only argument I have with TextMaker, that their autosave feature ... isn't what I think an autosave feature is. It only saves to a temp file, to restore in case of a crash, rather than to the regular directory; and if for some reason the restore function doesn't work, then you're fucked. Sorry 'bout that.)
So I had to rewrite all of today's work. Which was a grump and a grind, and never mind if it actually came out better the second time; that's traditional. T E Lawrence, I believe, left the first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom on a bus or a railway platform or whatever, and always insisted that it was a much better book after he'd entirely rewritten it from scratch*. And it is clear evidence that my industrious friends are right, who treat the first draft merely as a guide and rewrite their second drafts almost entirely. Nevertheless. This is not for me, because I hate it. Also, it runs counter to my nature. I can do writing-again if the first draft is lost; but if I have a draft, words I have actually committed to screen and disk and cloud, then that's a concrete thing and only to be abandoned if it is demonstrably wrong. If the plot changed beneath it, or a character dangerously uprooted themselves, or whatever. I like to claim this as an artefact of my origin-story, back when words were typed hard onto paper and had to be typed again if they were changed. One made every effort then to get them right the first time. It's a much more liquid process now - like writing in pencil instead of ink, which is a very different art and I had to relearn it and I never really did that very well. Somewhere deep inside, I think I still think that a word typed is a commitment made. The first half-dozen drafts happen in my head, sentence by sentence. I suspect you young things do all that with pixels.
*This may of course be a literary myth, but please don't disillusion me. I believe it; I want to believe it; I like to believe it.
And the document I'd been working on, when I went to restore it? Was blank. Had wiped itself entirely, do not ask me how or why. So I had to restore from a back-up, which didn't include any of the work I'd done today. (This may be the only argument I have with TextMaker, that their autosave feature ... isn't what I think an autosave feature is. It only saves to a temp file, to restore in case of a crash, rather than to the regular directory; and if for some reason the restore function doesn't work, then you're fucked. Sorry 'bout that.)
So I had to rewrite all of today's work. Which was a grump and a grind, and never mind if it actually came out better the second time; that's traditional. T E Lawrence, I believe, left the first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom on a bus or a railway platform or whatever, and always insisted that it was a much better book after he'd entirely rewritten it from scratch*. And it is clear evidence that my industrious friends are right, who treat the first draft merely as a guide and rewrite their second drafts almost entirely. Nevertheless. This is not for me, because I hate it. Also, it runs counter to my nature. I can do writing-again if the first draft is lost; but if I have a draft, words I have actually committed to screen and disk and cloud, then that's a concrete thing and only to be abandoned if it is demonstrably wrong. If the plot changed beneath it, or a character dangerously uprooted themselves, or whatever. I like to claim this as an artefact of my origin-story, back when words were typed hard onto paper and had to be typed again if they were changed. One made every effort then to get them right the first time. It's a much more liquid process now - like writing in pencil instead of ink, which is a very different art and I had to relearn it and I never really did that very well. Somewhere deep inside, I think I still think that a word typed is a commitment made. The first half-dozen drafts happen in my head, sentence by sentence. I suspect you young things do all that with pixels.
*This may of course be a literary myth, but please don't disillusion me. I believe it; I want to believe it; I like to believe it.