Monday, October 22, 2012

New Pathways

The second book is moving along, although not quite in the direction I anticipated. It is currently wandering down new hallways, dragging new (and better) ideas and stories along with it. Unfortunately, that does slow things down a bit, and I'm having to push the publication date out again by at least two months. Now we're looking at sometime in April.

It's funny how November seemed so far, there was no way I couldn't get it done by then, but now it's less than ten days away and I'm not even half way through what is turning out to be another first draft of the second book!

Then there's NaNoWriMo in November, so that's going to slow me down some. :)

But the second book is bringing in characters we were barely introduced to in A Queen Reborn, and pushing them forward. Somehow, a potential love interest for Captain Malano popped in and could prove to be interesting.

One thing this new version brought along with it was a flashlight, so I have a pretty good idea now of where we're going to end up on this one.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Found!

So, in my last post, I was dangling over the precipice of despair, feeling numb from the soles of my feet to the ends of my hair. Six weeks of work was gone.

I took another look and noticed that the date of the last modification was also six weeks prior. Now, I KNOW I'd worked on it and I KNOW I'd renamed it. Every month, I change the name of my manuscript to reflect the date. For instance CCB2 9-2012 for the Citadel Chronicles Book 2 September 2012. That tells me the file name and the most recent edit.

I also like to send it to myself via email on the advice of Elle Neal. I'd been doing that, pulling the document from the email attachment and working on it.

So what happened? What happened is that this whole mess was caused by technology being handled by a techno dork. I didn't realize the program wouldn't simply know where to save the document, that putting it in a file with like-named documents wouldn't be the first choice.

To make a long story short, I discovered my manuscript by accident. At that point, I looked at the source file and found it has been living in the Downloads file.

Downloads. Because when I downloaded it from my email, it didn't automatically save it in the regular documents file, because that would only make sense to a dork like me, not a computer filled with technology.

Anyway, suffice it to say I've rescued the manuscript and have managed to get some editing done despite the near catastrophe. Emailing the document to yourself is an awesome idea, just remember to save it to the proper file so you're not left wondering what just happened to six weeks of your life.

:)