Day thirty-three of the writing streak
I got a big fright today. The reason for it is that when I opened my Scrivener document, it indicated that I was underneath the 80.000 word count, even though I KNOW that yesterday I passed it by about a hundred words. And then, when I checked the last page I had worked on yesterday, I saw that it was missing at least four hundred words! I immediately checked my backups – I set up my Scrivener to automatically back up the document to my google drive account at the end of every session – and to my horror I noticed that there was no backup for yesterday…!! This had never happened to me before and I don’t understand why it did today…
I was really upset because, not only had I lost the words I had worked on the previous day which were intended to help me figure out and work on the missing subplot, but also because with all those words having gone missing, Scrivener indicated that I was back under the 80.000-word count mark, which had been the milestone I was so proud of reaching yesterday.
Eventually I calmed myself down, deciding to be grateful for the fact that only a few hundred words went missing, and not more. And then I started doing the only thing I could do at that moment, which was to re-read the last couple of paragraphs which had been saved, in order to figure out how much of my writing had gone missing, and hopefully write it back down.
The unexpected good news is that, as soon as I typed in my first word – after being done with the re-read – all my missing words suddenly reappeared and Scrivener updated my total word count to bring it back up over the 80.000-word count mark. I guess there’s no need to describe how happy that made me. I have to admit though that I have no clue as to what happened and where this unexpected bug – and fix – came from… and if I’m being honest, after this scare, Scrivener lost a big chunk of my trust.
Now that my words were back though, I was finally able to pick back up where I left off yesterday. I’m happy to say that the work I did yesterday indeed helped me a lot today, and I was able to write more than I had expected. I think I figured out a good direction for the subplot, and so many new ideas came into my mind on how this can and should entangle with the rest of the story. All these new thoughts and ideas overflowed my head, which is why I made a big decision today. Seeing as I know myself, and I know that all these new ideas could keep me busy for many weeks to come, I have decided to set myself a deadline for it. And since merging the subplot into the main plot will probably require a lot of re-writing anyway, I have decided that that will be a job for draft two, since that’s when I’ll go over the entire novel anyway. For this reason I decided that in this draft I can only work on brainstorming and general outlining for the subplot, without actually writing it into the novel. I have also decided that I only have until the end of this month to finish draft one. That means that by the end of the 31st of this month, no matter what, I will stop working on the first draft, I will put it aside for at least two weeks, and when I get back to it, it will be to begin the next draft. Sometimes I simply need a deadline. Otherwise I know that I could easily work on something forever – or at least, for a lot longer than I should. And since I know that the main plot is already all there and that I’m only missing “details”, I feel like my deadline is a reasonable one.