No Excuses.

Let's talk about that novel that's been in progress for ages, the one you're pretty sure you'll finish someday (especially if it's your first novel but even if it's your twentieth). Let's talk about why it's stalled.

I'm finishing my novel for Lent. For reasons we don't need to get into here (but I did elsewhere, for the curious) I've turned the runup to Easter into my own personal NaNoWriMo. You may remember I said I don't do NaNoWriMo, and I don't -- I've set the word count at a sustainable rate for myself, and I've been able to nail it every day except for the time the school called and said they foresaw an ambulance ride in my son's future. (There wasn't. He's okay.)

What I've realized is not just that I required a swift kick in the pants to get finished, but why I needed it: I was allowing normal problems to derail me. So let's back up a bit. Are you too-easily discouraged?

The problem with being an instinctual writer, the kind of seat-of-the-pants writer who navigates the drafting process via instinct rather than road map, is that sometimes our instincts are wrong. Or rather, as instinctual writers, we believe it should be easy. When it gets hard, we may mistake resignation for a writing pause.

This kind of stall is not just the writer making excuses for not writing. I mean that sometimes we legitimately get derailed, only by something that shouldn't have had that much power over us. Maybe in those cases, it's time to borrow tricks from our more-disciplined outlining and word-counting siblings to clear the hurdles. Maybe that's the time to pull out the yardstick and figure out just how much we should be producing per day. And then produce it. No excuses.

Just after the midpoint of my WIP, the reader needs to know a minor character has realized something vital to the plot. The problem? He's not a POV character. Another problem? He keeps this information to himself. I couldn't figure out how to convey his realization, but I had to because it's going to explain why things start going wrong for my protagonists, and yet no solution I came up with resolved the problem to my satisfaction.

I asked my agent. I ranted at my Patient Husband. I lamented to a friend. I wrote nothing. I wasn't even at that part of the novel, but I stalled.

But once I resolved to write my daily minimum, that scene came up, and when it came up, I had to solve the problem. I had no choice. No more dithering. And while I walked out to get the mail, on the day I needed to solve it -- I found the solution.

It's not just that one scene. I've discovered repeatedly that when I'm forced to solve a problem because the word count demands it and we're at that scene...the solution comes. What's the next scene? I don't know. But that doesn't mean I need to take five weeks to figure it out. It's not going to be any easier to figure it out in May than it is today, right? The pace forces me to settle on a solution and enact it -- today. Otherwise I won't get today's pages done.

That's not to say I haven't revisited those pages the next day to do it better. What I'm saying is that sometimes if you're a SOP writer, the tendency is to say, "The solution will come when it comes."

Maybe instead it's better to get up and stride toward the solution. Because now I'm chugging ahead on the manuscript, and I'm furious at myself for the time I've lost waiting for The Idea Fairy to present the next scene, or a way to convey a third party's information, and so on. 

I still hold to the idea of a literary pause. But not literary laziness. Only the writer can tell the difference.

Here's my suggestion, though. If you've got a work-not-in-progress when it should be, and if your literary pause has lasted longer than a week, pick it up again. Write all the way up to your trouble spot. Force yourself to write through it. If it works, then you're steaming ahead. If it doesn't, then rip out those pages and try another approach. But don't discount the idea of momentum. Sometimes going through the motions does lead to real results.

---

Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or ejecting stink bugs from the house. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency. 

Backing Up: Know Your Options

So last week I walked into my computer room and was met by an ominous ticking sound and an even more ominous error message: Operating System not found.

Only two years old, my high-end hard drive had died.  Now, I'm a Geek with a capital G, and I knew just what to do to recover the data from a dead drive.  Problem was, it hadn't just died, it had self-destructed inside.  See, there's a disk inside your hard drive, and it spins.  Well, mine didn't spin anymore. 

My data was gone, and nobody was getting it back. Right about then, a Geek friend of mine offers this on Facebook (where I was bemoaning the passing of said hard drive): 

Don't forget the Primary Directive: "Always Back Up." Alternatively, be more like Jesus. After all, "Jesus Saves."

I told him he was soooooo not helpful.

But fortunately, I'm compulsive about backing up, and all I lost was a few PowerPoint slides I'd edited into an existing (and backed up) presentation.

So...do you back up?  And do you do it regularly?  Let's look at some of your options, including a few Suzy and our readers suggested in a post last fall.

1. The Flash Drive Solution

A lot of people use flash drives.  I, personally, lose them.  Often.  Other people don't lose them...they just accidentally leave them in pockets that go through the wash.  Repeatedly. So I finally attached one to my keychain, and that seems to have taken care of my problem.  I use an 8 GB Verbatim that I love, though a lot of people swear by this Kingston drive or, if you prefer one without a cap you can lose, this one.

The problem with this solution, for me, is that I have to remember to plug my keychain into my computer.  I'm also a little paranoid about the possibility of losing it and having someone steal my manuscript.

The other problem is that I don't just want to back up my writing.  I also do a lot of photography, and 400GB of photos doesn't fit on an itty bitty flash drive.  So I decided to try an external hard drive.

2. The External Hard Drive Solution

Now this is cool. For a mere $80, I got a500GB iPhone-sized drive by a company that knows hard drives and includes sync software that really works: the Seagate FreeAgent Go. You just plug this baby into your hard drive, and it will automatically back everything up every night at a time you designate.

When I tell people about this drive, they often volunteer that you can buy a 1 Terabyte (that's a lot of storage space, folks!) Western Digital myBook at BestBuy for about $100.  What they don't realize is that the myBooks are kind of bulky, and they come in a distant...oh, 50th...in comparison to the Seagate.  I also have a WesternDigital myPassport, which I like, but it really does come in a distant 2nd to my Seagate thanks to inadequate sync software.

So for an easy, inexpensive, reliable all-in-one package, go with the Seagate.

Now I, like you, wonder what that means if there's a fire.  So I bought a second external hard drive, which I keep at work.  I bring it home once a week, back everything up, and take it back to work.

3. Sync Software

Let's say you already have a backup drive, whether it's a flash drive, an external hard drive, or something else, but you don't have good sync software for whatever reason.  Maybe your drive didn't come with it.  Maybe what came with it is confusing, or doesn't work well.

After comparing a bunch of sync programs, including expensive bigger-name applications, I found one that's easy to use...and free: AllwaySync.  If you use it daily, it will eventually prompt you to buy the pro version, but the license isn't expensive, and it's not just for today's version of the program...it's good forever, you'll never have to pay another dime.  This is the route I took to get the most out of my Western Digital myPassport.

4. Email Backups

The nice thing about modern email programs like Gmail is that all of your messages are stored online, rather than on your hard drive (as is usually the case with, for example, Microsoft Outlook).  Gmail also offers an outrageous amount of storage space, so you can email your manuscript to yourself just as often as you like.

5. Online Document Managers

Reader Iapetus999 reminds us that GoogleDocs and OfficeLive let you edit online documents from any computer. These applications even include helpers like spellcheckers, formatting, and sharing, so you can make sure your crit-mates are reading from the most-recent draft!  And as nightsmusic explains, applications like this "can be set to sync periodically while you're working on the document so you don't lose anything."

6. Online Hard Drives

Our readers like Mozy (which offers unlimited backup for $4.95 a month and will do an automatic backup once a day) and iDrive (which offers 2GB of space for free -- plenty for most people's writing).  PC Magazine gave their Editor's Choice Award to SOS Online Backup, and the Wall Street Journal is a customer.  It's more expensive than some, but offers a lot of power and is easy to use. Carbonite is an automatic backup service for $55 a year.  It's a tiny background application that continually looks for things that have changed on your machine and need to be backed up. For automatic backups on the Mac, try Time Capsule. Edit: A number of people recommended DropBox in the comments -- it's free! (Thanks, guys!)

7. The Hard Copy

It's a pain to print out a manuscript and put it in a binder, but if you're really paranoid (or a sci-fi buff who knows what an EMP is), it might be a good idea to do it quarterly and drop it off in a local safe-deposit box.  That way if the computer world ever implodes, all is not lost.

What did I miss? What are your tips for backing up?

Safeguarding Your WIP

With three consecutive free days this last weekend, I'd planned to devote myself wholly to writing. I even Facebooked about it:

(probably jinxing myself by even mentioning it) I've cleared the next three days to write, write, write!

Well, jinx myself I did. When I sat down to my WIP, a little munchkin got curious and disconnected my power cord from the AC-to-DC converter. (And for the record, I only knew it was called that because my husband just told me.) My laptop's screen went blank, and when I powered it back up an error message blipped up to haunt me. Windows had failed to start.

Thus ensued three whole days without my laptop. When my technically talented husband returned from his jaunt to New York and ran the gamut of tricks from his bag, he announced that my elderly laptop (I've had it four years) must go to the laptop doctor in an effort to prolong its life. (Yeah, I know - it's old enough to be put out of its misery.)

I'll admit, not having my laptop has put me in a bit of a funk but I've not fallen into the pits of despair. Why? Because there are copies of my WIP stashed away in a couple of different places. And you should do the same.

Backup your documents on a device outside of your computer. Flash drive, disc, portable hard drive, etc.

Okay, so I can hear you now, echoing the thought that ofttimes runs through my head: "But what if my house burns down and my computer and backup drive go up in flames?" Don't panic. There is a solution.

There are places online where you can store your files.

One option is a one-member Yahoo group. As silly as it sounds, Yahoo groups are free and offer huge storage space. (For instance, I've only used 2% of my allotted space for all my documents.) Another option is to pay for a service that is dedicated specifically to file storage. Mozy, for example, will backup unlimited docs for a reasonable fee.

Now the trick is to backup your WIP every time you make changes to it. I'm not saying every five minutes. Once a day will do. But it's important to get in the habit of doing so. (It only takes a minute or two.)

And what if you have to take your computer to the doctor? Be sure to ask them to backup the hardrive before attempting any repairs.

UPDATE: Here's some great info about Mozy from Calista Taylor: "I recently signed up with Mozy.com which offers a free backup service (limited space unless you pay for unlimited). Just sign up, download the software, and it'll automatically backup your files to their site every 24 hours. You don't even need to worry about remembering to do it yourself!" Thanks, Calista!

So, dear reader, I want to hear from you! Have you ever survived a computer crash? And how do you backup your WIP?