Scrivener Ate My Novel

I was doing great. 

As planned when I last posted, I was working on a timeline for my magnum opus - going through scenes to find the timing of everything and dropping the information into a gantt chart, making minor changes to the text. That's been my last ... four days.

Then yesterday I set up and turned on my computer, went about my normal "getting ready for the day" routine, casually passing my computer and opening scrivener, then the file, and saw it open to where I had left off the day before. Fine. No problem.

I was doing something in a different part of the house (no one else was around) and when I came back, my computer was asleep (of course). No problem. Tap it to wake it up. Scrivener is still open, but the document I was in was blank! No words!

I clicked on the document above it in the manuscript folder. Blank. The next one - blank. So I panicked and closed Scrivener.

I opened it again and thought, "Maybe it's a visual thing." The project still showed a 149,000+ word count, so the words were there somewhere! I compiled the manuscript to a word doc. Then I opened the word doc. Blank. (well, chapter numbers, nothing else.)

Crap.

THIS WAS A  150,000 WORD NOVEL!

I was devastated. It was the big one. No way I could recreate it. So many hours, so many tears, so much thought and research, down the drain. (I had done a backup in January, but as a compiled word doc, not in Scrivener.)

I took a break, trying to clear my head (and cry a little) laying in the bedroom and scrolling on my phone.

My spouse came in to check if I was okay, asked if my computer was on and if I'd mind a little help. It didn't take long, before we found that - THANK GOD! - the "docs" folder contained separate text files for each scene or chapter as I'd broken them out. So all my work wasn't gone, it was just... hiding.

It's still a pain, because I had to start a new scrivener document and manually copy all that text into the new one, but it's a lot less work than the hundreds of hours of writing. The nice thing is I am organizing it a little differently as I go. I split a few of the longer text files until I got rushed and had to just drop everything in. 

That was yesterday. Today I'll go through, split some more of the files, see where they all need to be, and look for my timeline, if it's still around. Then I have to see if I can match up the comment files into the text documents. Comments are linked to specific words or phrases that were highlighted in the Scriv doc, but now I'll have to guess which comment was connected to which part of a scene. Plus, I've split some. Crap.

It's okay. More hours for my Camp Nanowrimo goal!

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