You know me, I change my mind more often than I change my socks (This explains my odor). I've been sending out cleaned up drafts of chapters of my novel, The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind, to a small group of friends for over a year now, and it's only been twelve chapters so far. I did it this way as an experiment to kick me into gear on the project (obviously didn't work very well) and to show the curious how the book was going to evolve over successive drafts. Since I lost a lot of my notes with the abduction of my laptop weeks ago, I've taken the opportunity to re-evaluate this method after salvaging what I could of the remainder of the novel from old drafts.
I don't think I'll be sending any more chapters out for quite a while. I'm going to write the current draft through to the end of the novel and then do another draft of the entire thing. I'm finding it a lot easier to get through it that way. When more stuff is ready, and I'm sure that will be next year, I'll ship it out to those concerned. Right now, I'm enjoying the work and I don't want to stop enjoying it.
It sucks to lose your work, but if it helps you improve your skills or workflow, I guess you'll get something out of it at least!
ReplyDeleteDo you keep any of your work online in the cloud? I've been trying to participate in NaNoWriMo this year(not going to hot), but I had planned to use Google Docs to at least protect my work from flood, fire, theft, if not my own horrid procrastination...
Yes, actually. A recovered a draft from 14 months ago that I had stuck on Google Docs, for some reason. I was very happy to at least get that. I recovered the latest drafts of my first twelve chapters by lifting them from the same e-mails I sent to those readers. So, Yay!
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that was a relief, starting over from scratch would be pretty frustrating!
ReplyDelete