Second item, I'll be giving a workshop at Romance Divas on Friday (I'll check comments on Saturday, too) titled: Torture For Writers: Putting the Screws to Recalcitrant Characters. My workshop will deal with some methods to get more information from the characters and also what to do if the writer is the one getting in the way of the story. I always add the caveat that there are more ways to do things than what I mention and that you should do whatever works best for you. I'm offering a few more tools for the arsenal.
For the last week and a half, I've been dealing with computer issues--or rather one computer issue. I lost some of my email folders. I could still see them on the machine, but they weren't showing up in Outlook Express. For the first week, I tried to fix it myself. I did online search after online search, tried free programs, tried a program I had to buy and nothing retrieved my email.
I would have given up here because most of the email on my computer isn't that important--in fact, a lot of it is there because I haven't taken the time to go through it and see what I can get rid of--but I also have this habit of emailing notes to myself about various books. Some of them are stories I've finished, some of them are ones I'm working on, but others are just ideas. Those were the bulk of the missing folders. :-(
That meant I needed to call in an expert. And after four days of working on it, he managed to retrieve about 2/3rds of my missing folders. I don't remember the emails inside the folders, so I have no clue what, if anything, is missing from within, but at this point I considered it a miracle to have anything back at all.
I've learned my lesson. I will never hard boot down my computers again. I will back up email in two places. I will use gmail to back up email as a third place.
My other realization out of this mess is that I need to go through my email. I have 89 notes in my inbox and nothing stays in my inbox that I don't have to deal with in some way. If I get a note and I don't have to do anything, I stick it in another folder. Some of my notes date back to April 2008. Some of them are important.
I also decided that I need cleaning out the email that is unnecessary. A lot of it was kept for a reason at the time, but that time has passed and so has the information. For example, I started doing some deleting last night and found notes from my writing buddies from 2005 about books that that had been released years ago. Why was I keeping all those notes? Um, no time to go through them.
Can I go through all my email and trim before I either get 1) too busy or 2) too bored? I don't know, but I have to give it a try.
