Death, Mayhem, and Chaos

It's 0'Dark:Thirty in the morning.  My cat awakens me and drags me out of bed.  (Hey, he's a big cat, he does what he wants.)  My eyes have yet to adjust to the darkness filling my sleeping quarters. I struggle into the room down the hall, where my work awaits me.  I crank on the main computer, and while I'm waiting I examine the processes being performed on the backup.  They've stalled.  I have to restart them.

After the main computer is done booting I follow my long-ingrained habit of checking my mail.  NOTHING that can't wait.  I start to wander off to Facebook, and my other favorite websites that keep me distracted.  Something snaps inside me.  NO!  my soul cries out.  I need to work on some writing in the morning, so I can develop that as a habit, I remind myself.  I need to break that habit of browsing the internet, getting lost on the digital frontier, meandering unexplored "terrortory."  So what do I write about, I ask myself.  Write about what's important to you, I tell myself.

Yesterday I started the day by trying to get some more resumes and cover letters sent out to apply to some jobs I saw posted.  I have been working as a substitute teacher at Bellevue Christian School, where I worked lat year part-time, teaching two classes - one Introduction to Computer Proggamming Fundamentals class, and one Math-lab class.  I've also been trying to get more hours as a tutor at some of the local tutoring centers.  I've decided that maybe I might have to go back to working as a software tester, or as a phone support tech.

So, I start to send out cover letters for some positions I found, only to realize that although I have copies of my cover letters for subbing/tutoring, that in all the furor of my having had computers crash, backing up files, trying to organize those backups of backups, I have managed to lose all the copies of the s/w testing cover letters I had had.  Nothing on the main computer, nothing on the backup computer, nothing on the external hard drives or the pocket drives.

This sends me into an "organizing frenzy," trying to search out where any old copies of the cover letters might be.  Some of you might think it would be quicker to re-write the cover letters, and for yourselves you may be correct - for me, well....  Anyway, so I finally find copies of some emails I had sent out sometime ago, and I snatch those to use as templates to create the new cover letters - those I need to work on later today.

So what's the point of this particular Ruggles' Wandering?  It's not only important to keep backups of all your writing projects, but it's important to keep them organized.  Even now, as I type this treatise on the main computer, my backup computer is in the process of doing, well backups.

So, I'm trying to practice what I preach - if you are making regular backups, hurray for you.  But how well are you doing at keeping track of what's the most current version?  How many backups do you have scattered around on various media? 

I was reading yesterday's post at Author Culture, where K.M. Weiland writes "Organization takes a little extra effort, but once you have a system in place, it saves untold minutes you might have spent hunting down research notes, sorting through scribbles to find your latest burst of inspiration, or running searches through your computer’s hard drive in pursuit of that outline your wrote last fall."

So, since it's the new year in 8 days, I'm going to try to make it my resolution to spend more time writing, and in order to enable that, I need to get better organized.  And with that thought - I need to go see about doing some critiques for next month's meeting of my NCWA critique group, and getting my own work submitted.

Tomorrow's Christmas, so Merry Christmas, Happy Chunnakka, and Happy New Year.