Save Your Work! (Crashcourse, Days 21, 22, & 23)

Welcome to Days 21, 22, & 23 of Crashcourse!

You can't really see it, but that's a nice sunset back there.
Exploring the ancient suburban structure known as the “mall.”

Despite a sizable hiccup, Crashcourse is at full-steam right now. What kind of hiccup, you ask? The kind that comes with an error message.

Save Your Work!

I spent the last three days in creative editing mode, yet still managed to add 3,830 words in eight hours. The story is growing in heaps and bounds and I can’t help but wonder if this will be my first book to pass the 100,000 word mark. My other books all average about 80,000 words apiece, but Crashcourse feels bigger than that.

After two to three hours of writing on Friday, Microsoft Word shut down on me. On the bright side, the error message promised it had saved changes to the document and I could recover them once I reopened the program. So, I reopened Word and … nothing. I had set auto-save to do its thing every ten minutes. But for some reason, it didn’t work and I lost a ton of work. On a whim, I tracked down the Autorecovery folder. Unfortunately, there was nothing helpful there. Overall, it was extremely annoying and a good reminder to save my work on a regular basis, rather than depend on Autorecovery.

Anyway what could I do? I just pointed my cursor at the right spot and started writing again. And you know what? It was actually kind of freeing. Don’t get me wrong. I would’ve rather spent my time writing new stuff. But it was an interesting experience to write something all over again on a moment’s notice. The words flowed just fine and I had fun. This new version is definitely different than the original version, although I can’t be sure how much. Regardless, the story continues to flow nicely.

Crashcourse Totals

Three-Day Total: 3,830 words in 8:00. 479 words/hour

Total: 22,338 words in 35:42. 626 words/hour

 

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