Long story short: Good progress, then crushing setback.
Long story long: Using what I have come to think of as "the Doctorow method" I'd been making pretty good progress writing-wise. In a week-and-half or so, I'd written 17 pages of script. Considering that I generally got 45-minutes a day to write, I felt good about this. That's probably a page-and-a-half or two pages a day.
And then tragedy strikes.
I use a piece of freeware for my word processing for two reasons. 1) Because I'm cheap and 2) because I'd rather not give my money to Microsoft. I may need to rethink both of those reasons. The software has always been a little glitchy and slow, but on Friday evening the software closed out of nowhere as I was finishing up a three-page sequence. And, of course, as is my wont, I hadn't saved any of that work. As I was coming to grips with this (I swear these two things happened one after the other) I saw that I had received a new email. It was Todd Demong, my collaborator on 100 Girls who was just getting around to reading the script for chapter eight and two pages seemed to be missing for the script. I opened up the script I'd sent him and, sure enough, there was a gaping hole exactly two-pages big. Two pages I'd written and saved prior to send them off to Todd.
This really was a blow to me. To feel like I'd gone from 17 pages down to 12. And, even worse, having to recreate work I'd already done just left me deflated.
Deflated enough that I took most of the weekend off from writing. But I figure that I should jump back on that horse and recreate the pages I need and then finish the current script. I'm also in the market for good cheap word processing software if folks have a suggestions.
That is all.
3 comments:
There's no reason that free software has to be buggy. I use OpenOffice.org on my laptop, and I've never had it crash or do anything like you described. It's a full-featured office suite. If your Mac Mini has an Intel CPU then you can install the latest version, which is very stable. If you have a PPC processor in there, then you'll have to stick with an older version that I haven't used.
Don't give up on open source software. There are a lot of great programs out there. I'm sure you can find one that works for you.
I've got to agree with Stuart, I've been using OpenOffice.org for nearly five years on Windows computers now with absolutely no problems, and it's promoted as a freeware/opensource word processing package. I do have to ask the question, with sites like scripped.com, and zhura.com, do you think that these will be useful tools for people exploring script writing on their own?
Hi, CA3,
Thanks for leaving a comment. I've been using OpenOffice on a Mac, and maybe that's the difference? I'm not necessarily knocking the product, I'm just saying it's not working for me.
And as far as those site you recommended go: I haven't tried them. If anyone has, I'd be willing to listen to reports about them.
I'm currently demo'ing Scrivener, which I like a lot. A lot.
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