Break Stuff

Thank you so much Windows for screwing me over tonight.  You have no idea how much I appreciate that.

I have been working my little fingers to the bone trying to get Demonic Dreams written while I still have pain meds and I have been doing amazingly well.

Every time I finish a chapter, I export my book from my writing software into Word and save it.  After K. Smith Proofs gets done editing the “final” version, I delete all these extra files that are just chapters usually anyway.

I finished a chapter entitled Malachi and started on the next one.  I was about 3/4 of the way done it.  My computer suddenly rebooted.  I hadn’t realized it was doing an update.

I try to open my writing program and it tells me it can’t.  Essentially there’s some file missing.  So I go to redownload the sofware… I don’t have the key anymore.  I had saved that email, but it’s not on this computer, which is weird.  I plug in my external hard drive… A search can’t find the email, nothing…

Well isn’t that just freaking dandy at 11:30 pm.  So I go out to the software home.  Realize I had upgraded to the software when I was making good money and I can’t afford it right now.  It would be April before I could.

But hold on.  I upgraded from WriteWay.  It wasn’t badly priced it just didn’t have one specific function.  Then the Universe Smiles on me… WriteWay has become Freeware.  I can download and use it for FREE!  No cost!  It’s really hard to beat that price, especially as a broke novelist at the moment!  The only real function I wanted that WriteItNow did better than WriteWay was a character profile (with a random name generator for unimportant characters.  But hell there’s a free app for my iPhone that does random name generation.

The best part – other than being free, WriteWay doesn’t require Dragon Naturally Speaking – which absolutely hates my guts to take voice commands and do talk-to-text.  WriteWay works just fine with the Microsoft Voice Command and Voice-to-text software.

And I don’t have to rewrite the 30,000 words I had already written.  I just have to write 3,000, because WriteWay will let me upload Microsoft documents, so everything that I had exported is still alive and well.

Since I am frustrated with the loss of those 3,000 words, I’m going to spend the rest of my night getting Demonic Dreams put into WriteWay and tackle them in the morning!

PS: No matter how much time I spend training Dragon, Microsoft Voice still understands me better.  I have logged nearly a 1,000 hours training Dragon and I’ve spent about an hour training Microsoft Voice and Microsoft still understands me better, so I can live with going back to using WriteWay.  It turns out I only used the character profiles like three times in the last year.