Can I Have This In Triplicate?

Always save your work frequently. And always save it in multiple spots.

It's the 14th day of NaNo, and I'm not as far as I would like to be nor even as I should be, but I still had over 16,000 words written for “Peeping Tomcat.”

Then when I tried to work on it some more during lunch yesterday.....

Yes, I did tell it to repair. It just brings up a blank, single word
doc page with the word "repaired" in the file name. >_>

Yup. My old NaNo USB bracelet has failed me.

The actual USB portion was coming loose of the sleeve it sits in. Hubby, either at the end of last year or beginning of this one, was playing with my bracelet and accidentally pulled the USB completely out of the protective sleeve. The drive seemed to still be working well enough so, aside from being mildly upset, I just shrugged it off.

Problem is, now I can accidentally pull the bracelet portion away from my computer but leave the USB behind. Which means I have to pull it out with a very careful and precise grip in order to keep everything together. It also is super easy – specifically on my laptop; I haven't noticed this problem with my netbook or any other computer I've used the bracelet with – for me to barely bump the bracelet and the drive will disconnect from the port. I don't know if this is a port problem, or a result of the now faulty nature of the bracelet.

Well, it seems that it FINALLY bit me in the butt yesterday – or Sunday night when I disconnected the USB from my laptop, I'm not sure which. Somehow, in the process of saving endlessly over the weekend, and also accidentally disconnecting my drive and re-installing it while the file was still up, I managed to cross some wires.

I was intelligent enough to save on my laptop as well, once upon a time. It would mean I only had about 9000 words instead of 16,000, but it would be better than nothing. Except that file's gone too. I don't know what happened. It's just gone. 16,425 words are just gone. Lost to the ether. GONE! I wrote 11 out of the first 12 days of November. I even fought passing out on my laptop to force myself to write SOMETHING over the weekend. I only managed about 700 words combined between Saturday and Sunday, but it was SOMETHING. I still added to my overall word count. I wasn't giving up. But now nothing. All that time wasted. Lost.

Tanuki Facebook Sticker
by Yanare Ku

Obviously I'm devastated. I'm beside myself. I spent over an hour trying to find a way to recover the file, but nothing. I just get that single blank page with "repaired" in the file name. It's like the first half of the month didn't exist. Didn't happen. Like I didn't squirrel myself away or force myself to write or neglected cleaning my house so I could keep up with my word counts.

I'm tripping over stuff due to how terribly unorganized my house is right now, and it's because I've been neglecting anything outside of writing.... for nothing. NOTHING!

Tanuki Facebook Sticker
by Yanare Ku

Okay, so it's not for NOTHING. It was practice. Painful that I have no true fruits of it, but it was still practice. I struggled really hard the first half of the month, but I now know where I was going with it. I have things charted out. I worked through it. Also.... I learned this lesson.

Sure, it's easy enough to rewrite everything. If it were a normal novel situation I would be pissed, I would cry in the corner, I would mourn losing a fortnight's worth of work, but I would pull myself up by the bootstraps and rewrite what I wrote. It's still fresh enough in my memory that I could redo it. In fact, the few times something like this has happened in the past, I did exactly that: weep, throw things out of frustration, mourn the loss of all that work, and re-write. Want to know something? It came out better!

I only remembered the parts that I liked. I knew what parts I hated and went into the writing already concocting a better plan of attack. It was annoying, and I would never do so intentionally, but losing that work actually improved it.

And yeah, it still holds true now. As I mentioned, I figured out what was working and what wasn't. Do I hate that I don't have what was working and I have to pray I get it just as right this time? Yeah. Can I now go at it with a plan of how to improve what wasn't working? Sure. Did I already come up with ways to fix the "not working" parts and have been resisting the editing portion so I could get my work count first? Of course! So, this, under normal circumstances, would be bittersweet, but overall a "good" thing. Sorta. I'd be more capable to see the silver lining.

But this is friggen NaNo! I only have 16 more days to get to 50,000 words, and starting completely from scratch is devastating. Especially because, as mentioned, the 16,425 words I already had are now little more than a waste of time. Sure, I can personally still count them, but when I go to verify at the end of the month the site isn't going to know to add those lost words back in.

So, now even if I do write 50,000+ words this month, even if I can catch up completely from this half-way point of the month, I still won't get all those fun "winner" benefits and recognition. Not unless I do one of two things: 1) write 66,000 words in the next 16 days so I still have 50,000 to verify, or 2) "cheat" and just copy and paste 16,000 words so the site acknowledges the count. I kind of hate both ideas.... but you need to do what you need to do. Eh, maybe I'll just copy and paste 16,000 words worth of this blog so I don't feel so bad. It isn't included in my original count, but they are still new words I wrote this month.

Knives from the Scott Pilgrim comic books
by Bryan Lee O'Malley

ALWAYS save in more than one location, and do so frequently. I should have learned my lesson after losing this darn USB bracelet last November. Boy was THAT a heart attack! I should have also learned my lesson when my former college roommate thought she lost HER novel and nearly died. It's just... it got too tedious for me to save to the laptop and then Save As to the USB and then Save As again up on Google Docs and then Save As one last time on my netbook so that I could make sure I have a copy everywhere.

Third time's the charm, right? Maybe NOW I'll truly learn my lesson. Tediousness needs to be tolerated in order to ensure I don't keep losing my darn NaNo projects each year! Gaaaaah!

For those concerned, I did eventually write about 950 words last night. I just continued where I left off. I'll attach the opening 3 chapters after everything else is done. Otherwise I don't know if I'll ever complete the actual story. I HAVE to press on, even with such a set-back! I won't give up! I can't. I also have it saved in four places this time....

On the upside, while it will be a pain to go through it again, prior to losing everything, I managed to complete my third chapter; struggling through it the whole time. I also came up with my Akuma Villain, at least the first one they go up against.

Even for the level of cheesiness that is standard for "Miraculous Ladybug," who I came up with is pretty bad, but she's the best I've got so far, so I'm going to have to run with her. Maybe I'll either think of how to improve her or figure out a replacement for her by the time I get to the fourth chapter again.

In the meantime, meet Louise Fabron, AKA: Ms. Popular.

She started off as inspired by Poison Ivy, hence the red hair and green bodysuit. Her outfit doesn't look even remotely close to any other Akumatized villains, but I'm running with it. Until there's a Miraculous Villains dollmaker for me to tinker with, this is the best I have for creating a visual.

She has a Medusa-like gaze power that petrifies women and enchants men. The female victims become "mall mannequins." In truth, I'm not really sure what this has to do with popularity. Fashion statements? I dunno, it matched the Medusa-eye-power concept, so I ran with it. As for the men, the male victims become protective and bodyguards for the villain. I started off thinking she'd blow them a kiss to entrance them, and I may go back to that, but it seemed too close to the canonical villain Princess Fragrance, and I wasn't sure how to work in the possessed item.

In the bit I wrote over the weekend, Ms. Popular can also use her optic powers to get women to fight amongst themselves. I honestly have no clue how her powers work or how any of it relates to either popularity in general, or making her more popular. I need to really workshop her....

Anyway, her Akuma-possessed item are the glasses used to block her gaze until she wants to attack. The glasses are actually replicas of Chloe's. The villain became Akumatized when she tried to win Chloe's favor by dressing EXACTLY like her, only for Chloe to call her a creepy stalker and tell her she's never going to be popular.

Always watch out for girls named Louise. Between Louise from Familiar of Zero and Louise from Bob's Burgers, people should maybe be wary around a Louise. If those two weren't enough, eh, I added a third one.

Louise is actually a year younger than Chloe. So, based on the English translation, she would be in 9th grade: a high school freshman, at least in the US. In season 1 of ML the character Alix turned 15, but in a season 2 episode Marinette turns 14. We weren't given Adrien's age during his birthday episode, which happened to be the first ever episode of the series. So I'm not entirely sure where to put Louise's age, but I'll say 13. Which means obviously she's not going to look as mature as the Doll Divine mock-up I did, but I don't see why Hawkmoth's Akuma couldn't "age" her a little at least.

Like I said, I'm still kind of workshopping her as I'm writing. Speaking of, I should probably get back to that, I have quite a bit of ground to try to cover.... again.....