Writing a Novel in 24-Hours: My One-Day NaNoWriMo Experiment | Hacker News Reader

Writing a Novel in 24-Hours: My One-Day NaNoWriMo Experiment

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5 pointsamayne6 comments

a very interesting challenge. Did you have and process for making sure your work wasn't lost in progress?

I once felt particularly inspired, and wrote 20,000 words in a day, I had been hitting ctrl+s all day, and after reaching a good stopping point, I hit it once more. Then I heard the Seagate click of death, 20' words gone in an instant. I thought I was doing well for backups, my laptop was scheduled to do a diff backup with my server, and other computers ad midnight. This had saved me in the past, But not this time.

I still have yet to try re-writing what was lost that day, despite authoring other works. It is too disheartening.

Yikes!

I used Google Recorder which creates a real-time transcription and an audio file. After each chapter I'd back them up to Google Drive.

For my normal writing, I use Scrivener which is autosaved to Dropbox.

I'm glad you were safe from my type of disaster. Dropbox or Nextcloud are amazing for their instant backup ability. My loss happened about a year before Dropbox launched. Thanks for sharing. :)

I'm the author of the post. I'll be checking in here throughout the day if anyone has any questions and walks to talk about writing processes, etc.

That was a fun read, but... not even an extract from the final novel?

Fair point. It's an unedited mess and not my best work. As an example, here's what the start of it looks like right now:

Nobody knows what to tell you what a funeral. Especially when it's your own parents who died in a murder suicide. Everybody just sort of looks at you and stares and maybe stumbles through. I'm sorry, or let me know if there's anything I can do to help. What the fuck can they do to help? What the fuck are they sorry for? My dad's the one to blame. He's the one that took the shotgun blast to my mom and stomach in the face, and then shot his own fucking brains out. He's the one that needs to be sorry. What can you do to help? I don't know. Build a fucking time machine that help. I try not to be angry. But it's hard not to be every face. Everybody who looks at all the swollen eyes of the tears. Some are really I think all of it is just too much. I don't want to be here. I want to be anywhere else but here.

But I just don't know where that is.

So I just sit in the corner as people come up to me and tell me how bad they feel. I just shake my head, shake their hand, take a hug and want it or not,

and just sit back down

and stare at the closed coffin. Where my mom's bodies lane. God damn it couldn't even have an open coffin. Nope. No dad had to shoot her in the face.

Who saw that coming?

I didn't

say it was a surprise was a goddamn understatement. But here I am. 15 orphan orphan 15 Are you really an orphan? When you're 15 I mean, I guess so. But I always thought of orphans as babies and small children and Harry Potter.

That doesn't fit me.

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