My novel exploded

UPDATE: If you have Bean, and you have a big file (100+ pages), save the file in Rich Text Format. My novel file kept being corrupted because I was saving in Microsoft Word format. Something disastrous was happening in the conversion of the file.

Original post:

A while back, on Twitter, I recommended the Mac word processor Bean. It’s fast (very fast), autosaves at a frequency that you choose (Mine autosaves once every minute), is customizable, goes full screen, and automatically returns you to the point in the document that you were in the last time you were writing. It has been perfect for me, in the writing of my novel (which I have been working on for the past four or five years).

UNTIL TODAY.

I have no idea what happened, but after I saved and closed up Ungodly Trifles (that’s the name of my novel), it would not open again. I tried to open it up in Bean, then Microsoft Word, then OpenOffice. They all said the same thing. Some kind of problem with the file.

Finally, I was able to open it up in TextEdit (thank the Gods for TextEdit, that blunt, primitive word processor with no bells and whistles (not even a word count)). All the formatting was stripped. Ellipses were turned into ampersands and em-dashes were turned into little cubes, but the text was there and that’s what counts.

Now, if I hadn’t been able to open up the document, I would have done the following:

- Said ‘Oh no oh no oh no’ over and over again

- Railed to my friends about the callous insensitivity of this free word processor I downloaded from the internet

- Wept

- Vomited

- Wept

And finally, eventually, I would get around to rewriting. But damn, that’s hard. 

I should make clear that I wouldn’t have lost my WHOLE novel. I would have only lost what I had accomplished this year. The file is called ‘Ungodly Trifles 2011 Writing’. The names of the files that have preceded it and continue to exist on my hard drive and other places:

- Ungodly Trifles.doc

- Ungodly Trifles for passing in.doc (It was originally for a creative writing class)

- Ungodly Trifles Summer Writing.doc

- Ungodly Trifles Christmas Writing.doc

- Ungodly Trifles Christmas Writing Outdated Draft.doc

- Ungodly Trifles NOTES.doc

- Author Frame of Ungodly Trifles - First Completed Draft.doc

- Ungodly Trifles Summer Writing 2.doc

- Ungodly Trifles Post-Summer Writing.doc

- Ungodly Trifles 2009 Writing.doc

- Ungodly Trifles Italy and Post-Italy 2009 Writing.doc

- Ungodly Trifles 2010 Writing.doc

So, I’m thinking that the new document will be called ‘Ungodly Trifles Post-Explosion 2011 Writing’.

I’m pretty sure Bean did it, because I literally did nothing but save the file and try to open it again a few minutes later. 

Laura said it would be “ironic but tragic” if I were to lose the novel. That’s because the novel originally had an author character who had had his manuscript (called ‘Ungodly Trifles’) destroyed in a massive fire. The novel, then, was him trying to rewrite the manuscript from memory. A manuscript that begins with a boy and his grandmother in a snowstorm. So, the novel would go back and forth from the author frame to the novel frame. I ended up cutting out the entire author frame, so none of that was spoilers.

This was a long post. If you read all the way down to this last line, you’re insane or have insomnia, and you deserve a prize. So tweet me and I’ll send you a cool thing from Europe. And by ‘a cool thing’, I mean a postcard.