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15,000 Word Blog Word Count: 1,164
My NaNoWriMo Word Count: 1,668
Where we should be Word Count: 3,334


Day: 2

Tip# 2

Goeie More,

Good Morning all! I'd like to try to get these posts out to you as early as possible in the day. Yesterday didn't go so well, but I'm ready now!

So, my tip for today is a VERY IMPORTANT one. It can save you time and countless tears. This is absolutely necessary if you want to get to 50,000 with a computer that is still in one piece. I'm talking about technological issues. Your personal computer or whoever's computer you are writing on is not reliable. I don't care if you don't go on the internet ever on a brand new laptop so that it won't get a virus (then how are you reading this). It is possible for computers to simply crash. It is possible for the battery to go dead, turn off  your computer, and delete the days work on your novel. Try writing at 11:30 p.m. and losing all your work in one fell swoop, it sucks. You don't want this to happen:

So here's my advice SAVE YOUR NOVEL, and BACK IT UP!!!!! I cannot stress to you how important it is to have another copy of your file. This isn't a one page journal entry you worked on for 30 minutes, this is a full fledged novel you will work on for 30 DAYS! Losing all your hard work is completely unnecessary. There are countless easy ways to stop this from happening.

1. Save frequently! If you're writing in a Microsoft Word file, make sure you click the save button every time you have a lull. Thankfully Microsoft does it automatically, but if you make it a practice to save every time you're not typing away, you'll always save before you get up to leave or get distracted. These points in time are serious word depletion alerts. If you're not writing in a Microsoft Word file, save even more frequently and make sure to do one or two of the following.

2. Email!! Your friends know that you're working on this huge feat, why not keep them more involved. Send out an email either every day or at least every week. Attach the file and ask friends to keep it in their inbox for a month.  This gives you an opportunity to tell them how you're doing and gives you an online copy of your document in someone else's care. If your fearful your friends will open it and read your unfinished work (a. this can be a good thing, b. if you ask them not to they probably won't) simply email it to yourself. If you don't already have one create another email account. I have one for junk mail and such. You don't even need to go open it, just as long as it's there. Hopefully you'll never need to call in a favor and use your backup.

3. Online documents. Google has an excellent online documents page that will allow you to upload any file and edit it at your leisure. I use this for any group project I have to work on for school, it's great. But for NaNoWriMo this will let you access your work anywhere that has internet access. So, if you're at work or school you can just hop on the computer, type in your username and PRESTO! There's your novel! Update this daily so that you will never be without all of your work.

4. Flash Drives! Now my personal favorite is my flash drive. They run from about $10 to really expensive but the $10 one is all you'll ever need. Save your file on here every time you write and you can carry it everywhere with you! Now you can access your computer anywhere you have another computer, with or without internet access. Plus it saves a lot of time, everything online is great but it takes a little while to get to your document if your computer is slow. Flash drives give you instant access to everything. It doesn't come without its problems though. At home, make sure you have one file on your computer and one on your flash drive and make sure you are saving the one that is most update. When you're done for the day click file save then file save as and select the old file.

2.0 GM Flash Drive

5. Put it on a CD! CD's may seem old now that even music is on a little rectangular device but they are permanent. I'd recommended doing this twice all month, once at 25,000 words and once at 50,000 words. This you can put somewhere safe and know you almost have a hard copy.


BACK UP your material!!!!! It's necessary, your novel and NaNo wellbeing depend upon it!

Dare: Save your novel and BACK IT UP!!!!!!!!!