I am glad it was in Recycle Bin!

[JON-McISSAC]

Hello fellow writers and dreamers,

 

[mccardey]

Yayy for recycle bins!

Regarding how much or little work you need to do - that's entirely your call. We have people who write with no intention of ever getting published, and people with contracts and deadlines - and everyone in between. Once we get to know you a little better, we'll know where to target our advice. (I'm sorry if I sounded scarey in your Newbie thread. I was still on First Coffee...)

 

[Maryn]

Whew, eh? I urge you to approach more like a pro, though. When I realize I intend to make a major revision to a book, I never, ever change the original. I make a copy of the original and change the copy.

It’s going to happen again, probably: you’ll realize the way it was before you started futzing around with it was better, and you want to make sure to keep a copy.

Text takes up very little hard drive space, so save every draft. This could have turned out a lot worse, so I’ll just share your relief.

Maryn, who can store all drafts of a dozen novels at the free level of DropBox

 

[mccardey]

I've found it best to save multiple copies throughout each day, titled with the date of that day and an alphabetic suffix.

 

[Unimportant]

I rarely get around to actually writing, but I use a raid array to back up everything constantly. That way even if I get mad at something and delete it from my hard drive, it's still on the external drive.

 

[Jazz Club]

Oh wow, thank goodness for the recycle bin, eh? Glad you managed to recover it!

(I do the same thing as Maryn: never delete, no matter how crap I think it might be. I always start a new draft. You never know when you might change your mind! Plus, there are usually a few gems among all the bad stuff even on really bad writing days )

 

[Unimportant]

I like to keep at least one really, really bad story and one good (for me) story in my current folder so that when I feel I'm a crap writer I can go read them and compare and see that at least I've improved.

 

[Sonsofthepharaohs]

In addition to saving drafts, sometimes I also save random scenes, paragraphs, or just sentences that I didn't end up finding a home for, but kinda liked. These get saved as '[Novel / chapter / scene] cutting room floor' word files. You never know when the snippets that didn't work in one place might come in handy somewhere else.

 

[Maryn]

I do that, too. I have a folder for a novel, containing all my research, every draft, bio sheets, maps, whatever I needed to do to write it, and there's a fat file titled Deletions, material I wrote for one draft or another but removed in the final iteration.

Guess I don't kill my darling daughters so much as lock them away for future use.

 

[Brigid Barry]

Same. I have a file called "cut sections" and things I intend to splice in later will have more detailed names.

 

[Maryn]

Among my organizational failings is not grouping that fat deletion file's clips in some way that lets me find something easily. Maybe next book I'll do better.