Amazon has nothing on The Copyeditor’s Desk and its doughty imprints, Plain & Simple Press and (yes!) Camptown Ladies Press. Outa my way, Bezos: it’s slash and dash for the likes of you!
Yup. We started at five o’clock this morning and worked all the way through, with time off to multi-task while grilling a slab of tuna and slicing a tomato to go with it, to 9:30 p.m. That would be about 16 hours, give or take a few minutes. I did pause long enough to brush my teeth and wash my face. And I went out to lunch with Wonder-Accountant.
But as we and the IRS know, lunch with an accountant is a working lunch. 😉
Today’s marathon work frenzy is, to put it mildly, ALL MY FAULT.
I screwed up fairly massively a few weeks ago, as the MacBook was threatening, with all its siliconish little heart, to go down with a resounding crash. Seeing the beloved computer falter, I dumped data on every drive and pseudo-drive that would take it, trying to save the 87 gerjillion files I typically have open at any given moment.
(You wonder why my computers are given to crashing?)
Saved the data but scattered it all over creation.
Some files came to rest on DropBox; clones or later versions of those files settled like dust on the hard drive. The result was I found myself migrating back and forth between DropBox and the hard drive, and never really knowing (or remembering) where File A or File B should be stored.
The result? A fulminating mess.
Today I set out to clean it up. This, as you might imagine, was a task easier said than done. Shortly after setting out on said adventure, I sensed that the easiest strategy would be to create a new folder on the hard drive (titled, sapiently enough, “Clean Up the Mess”) in which I could store the latest, cleanest versions of the many mutant files I’ve been working on.
Yesterday I’d cleaned up DropBox…and felt pretty good about that.
Today I had to find, identify, and organize all the things I’d cleaned up from DropBox…not so good.
It literally did take the better part of about 15 hours. I’ve managed to get exactly zero productive work done.
However, the computer files and organization are looking a lot better.
I’d gotten into the habit of using DropBox as a hard-drive-away-from-home: a convenient way to share files between my own computers as well as among clients and contractors. This, I think, is not good, unless you’re willing to pay DropBox for the space to make that privilege work. Which, as you might guess, I am not.
So now I’ve got things set up so that the bulk of my work (and only my work) occurs on my computer’s hard drive, and DropBox is reserved for data that needs to be shared with others. That will clean a LOT of space-eating redundant data off DB. (A fair amount of it went into the Mac’s “Trash” folder…) Once very couple of days, I’ll back up a) Dropbox and b) Documents to flash drives.
Anything that goes on the iMac is backed up to Time Machine. But alas, the far more convenient and comfortable to use MacBook speaks not to H.G. Wells nor to his time machines. So the only way to keep data on its hard disk moderately safe is to back up early and often.
So, another day went by without my getting any writing done. It’s now almost 10 p.m. I’ve scarfed down my daily medicinal bourbon and water, and now I must crawl into the sack. And so, adieu and away!