Question for experienced authors!

[oggbashan]

You must build 'em tough in England.

I donate my dead computers to an organization which strips them down for parts.

I used buy my computers from Ministry of Defence surplus. They were 'ruggedised' for use in tanks on the move. Now I have them built for me. The screws are bedded in loctite. My main computer case has scratch marks from the last time I dropped it. I'm clumsy but I know I am. I pay about 10% more for toughness but still about 40% less than retail stores.

The IBM XT was originally supplied to a Defence contractor. It is standard - just properly built with lock washers on all screws and bolts.

Og

 

[KenJames]

Ken,

I just learned the hard way. I lost one of my very first stories, 270 pages Word, because the backup on floppy's had one faulty floppy in it. Gone!

Thank god there are recovery programs but it still cost me the last 3 chapters.

I'm so sorry to hear that. Losing work, especially creative work, is always so painful.

Experiences like that are the reason why I'm so paranoid about redundent backups. These days, I have two hard disks in each computer and use a utility program to automatically copy my writing directories to the second drive.

 

[Guest]

I get the main points of my story worked out in my head. The setting, characters, and circumstances of how it will play out.
Then I start typing into the computer.
Pen and paper.....Whats That?

Jmt

 

[SlickTony]

I once wrote a whole novel on legal pads, and then hired a typist to print it out for me, and put it on a disk. I was at sea then, and no where near a computer.

Why couldn't I ever have gotten jobs like that? The closest I ever came was this guy in Jacksonville who was writing some kind of paper or book on the history of the Windsor chair in America, but we never could work things out and the deal fell through. Later on he was retained to defend Josh Phillips* and was too busy. I never did hear back from him again.

I used to write stuff out in longhand, but not anymore. I usually work it out in my head and then it goes onto my hard drive, even if I can only actually put a sentence or two a night down.




*Josh Phillips was this boy who was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison for killing a playmate, a 9YO girl named Maddie Clifton. From what came out in the news, apparently he accidently knocked her out and then panicked or something and decided he had to finish the job and killed her. Then he hid her body under his waterbed while everybody in his subdivision turned out and combed the neighborhood inch by inch. Meanwhile the body was starting to stink. He slept over that for a week and told his parents the odor was from the birds he kept in his room. Personally I always thought his parents were far more complicit than ever came out in trial, based on my personal experiences with setting up and maintaining a waterbed.

 

[NoJo]

At the early stage of structuring stories I use a gel pen and a lined "Black 'N' Red" notebook, A4 or A5 size. Even if I'm sitting right at my computer. I'll write character outlines, jot down phrases, note down dates, events or places in the story.

Once I have a structure figured out I use screenwriting software, either Word 2003 or Final Draft for the outline and treatment.

I do the drafts using Final Draft. This is a completely different mode of working from my pen and paper doodles, and goes quite quickly, and I find it the most enjoyable stage -- I'm "running" by then.