Progress

I keep contemplating whether to post one of those nifty progress bars showing my work on Chivalrous, but that would mean that I'd have to clean up my work folder to get an accurate count. I've begun moving files around and re-titling them so that I know which order they go in, etc, but I still have multiple copies of things. I need a source control system. For anyone outside of software, that's a program that keeps a revision history of your source code, and lets you retrieve old versions. The old copies are generally archived (zipped) somehow so that they don't take up a lot of disk space, and you can label versions or add comments so that you know what each one contains. Best of all, when you open the working folder, you only see the latest version of each file, instead of my home-grown method (intro.doc, intro2.doc, introReArranged.doc, etc).

I have tried using Word and it's master/sub document structure, but I haven't found a good groove there, and I keep getting strange section breaks and errors about needing heading values, so I'm back to just a folder full of individual files. I think that method would work well if I had an established outline and knew where the "chapters" should break. Unfortunately, I am only now getting my outline firmed up, so maybe I could revisit that method once the majority of the editing is done.

There are very few things I have ever written that have started with an outline--manily technical documents that have a predefined structure, and the "writing" there is much more fill-in-the-blank kind of stuff. I did once write a quick Word macro that would sum up the word count for all .docs in a folder--should anyone else want it, let me know :)

On the progress front, I've made steady but slow progress the past two weeks. My files are labeled up to "Chapter 4". My heroine and hero have had their initial meeting and first major conflict (the fact that he's engaged to someone else), and have now been thrown together two additional times. My heroine is currently bashing down a wall to help vent a little frustration (well, she's remodelling a house too). Also, I came up with a much better opening line for my first chapter. I have three different versions of the opening so far, and none had a good opener until last night. Well, one had an OK opener, but I was playing with re-arranging scenes in that one and had trouble getting one of the ones in that I really liked.