Lessons Learned

The book flood anthology is, for all intents and purposes, done! Woohoo!

It’s not pretty, but it is what it is in the time I had. And in the process I learned several valuable lessons:

1. Pick a theme before picking your stories.
My theme was apparently “early stories that are out-dated and I didn’t know what else to do with them.” My stories run the gamut from comedy to morbid, and span a variety of genres. And when I came up short on stories I filled in the space with a few poems.
Also, I kept switching between all dark flash and all non-dark flash and all new stories to all old stories. Figure out what kind of stories you’re going to collect before you waste a lot of time editing the wrong story.

2. Give yourself lots of time – then add some.
I’ve been toying with the idea of an anthology for a while, but it wasn’t until I decided to use it for my book flood book that I started to get serious about it. I’m not sure exactly when this was, but I know I didn’t take into account the time suck NaNo would be.

3. Decide an approximate number of pages early.
It will help you figure out the size of your anthology and how many stories you’re going to need to work with.

4. Decide the binding ahead of time.
This kind of goes with number three because the number of pages will help determine the kind of binding you can go for. Just a few pages, you can have a chapbook, more and you’ll have to look for some other kind of binding.

5. Take it seriously.
I got caught up in the whole idea of an anthology and started working on it before I really thought it through. Then I kept changing my mind and waffling on the stories. If I’d been a little more serious about it I would have thought it through better and saved myself a lot of time and angst.

The anthology is a little stark looking, to my eye. It could have used a few flourishes like a more decorative font for the titles, maybe a graphic or two. Again, this is something I just didn’t have time for. And something to keep in mind for next time.

Ironically, I have an idea for next year’s NaNo and it’s a themed anthology. But trust me when I say I’ll be taking my time when it comes to publishing it.

Backing It Up

You know, it breaks my heart every time I read/hear about someone who’s lost that precious story or even the next best-selling novel because their computer crashed or got stolen, or there was a fire or flood, or the apocalypse happened. And in this day and age it’s so unnecessary!

You never know when disaster will strike. So I tell you all now, BACK YOUR WORK UP!

But wait! Get back here. Don’t go backing up yet, I have more to say.

Be organized when you back your work up.

*cue puzzled murmuring*

Let me tell you a story.

*waits for heartfelt groans to die down*

I’ll try and keep it short.

Really.

Okay, maybe not really. But you need to hear this. So quit belly-aching and just read.

As you know, I’ve been procrastinating spending a lot of time lately cleaning up and generally trying to get my writing files organized. Many writing files. Many, many writing files. While I’ve always been pretty good at backing my documents up, I’ve been pretty bad about doing it in an organized fashion. What I typically did was create a folder on a USB key and then just copy everything (and by everything I mean all my documents, whether I’d changed anything or not and any miscellaneous files, photos, etc.) from my laptop into the new folder on the key and call it done.

These folders had names like: short term 1, short term 2, miscellaneous 1, miscellaneous 2, current stuff 1, current stuff 2 . . . I think you get the idea. This is called laziness (in case you were wondering). The problem with this method is that it leaves me with multiple copies of the same document and I don’t know which is the one I’ve been working on. Did I mention I have about a dozen USB keys and all of them have got stuff saved to them in this fashion? And it gets better.

Not being entirely trusting of the whole USB key thing, every once in awhile I’d back my files up to a DVD. All of my files. Together. Then I’d label the DVD with the current date and stick it in a box. A big box. And now I have an external hard drive sitting in a box just waiting for the day when I get my files all organized so I can save everything to it. You know, unless everything crashes first or I get hit with an EMP or some natural disaster occurs.

The moral of the story, kiddies, is: Save your work and back it up on a regular basis, but do so in an organized fashion!

Prompt of the Week

I’ve been having so much fun with the prompts from The Story Shack that I think I’m going to keep using them until I stop having fun. :-D

Go ahead and give it a try! And don’t forget to check back Saturday to see what I’ve come up with.

Word count: 600
Genre: Crime
Character: A programmer
Material: A pencil
Sentence: "It was her!"
Bonus: Your character is imprisoned.